Quinn posted up a note this morning that Rawi Hage has won the IMPAC award. I only made it through three of the shortlisted books (too many challenges; too much travelling; very little reading) but DeNiro's Game was one that I read and loved. It's nice to see novels that were shortlisted for Canadian prizes, like the book I'm currently about 20 pages away from finishing, The Book of Negroes (which just won The Commonwealth Prize), go on to win international prizes. It's not as if I'm writing a "here's the trouble with the Giller" note or anything, but I'm glad that both DeNiro's Game and The Book of Negroes will go on to find larger audiences as a result of the attention.
Posting has been sparse, life seems to be overwhelmingly busy these days. And we're on the road again tomorrow, taking a family trip to NYC. Right now I feel like I've been travelling for months. And for those moments where I'm sitting behind my desk staring out the window thinking how nice it would be to have a job where I travelled even more, I'll need to remember this feeling. The one where I just want to be home with a good book, my two working hands, and some time to get caught up on my writing.
My Boy is Ten
My friend Heather took this photo a couple of weekends ago. We went for a walk in the woods. It was a bit cold at first, neither my boy nor ...
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Let me confess, first of all, that I don't read a lot of short stories. So while I'm a huge supporter of short fiction, I don't... -
Despite that fact that I'm fully aware that I'm home because I need to rest and, ahem, rest assured I'm doing just that, I have ...
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The last few weeks of my life have been the most terrifying and joyful I have ever known. The purpose of this blog has never been to documen...
3 comments:
Hey, great, he finally won one of the big prizes he was nominated for! That's good news.
I'm thrilled for him. He was on the news last night and his speech was beautiful.
He's featured in today's Irish Times - a full page article. Eileen Battersby has some nice things to say...
This year's win reiterates that Impac is the international literary prize to win. Most emphatically of all though, it shows how influential an international literary player Canada has become. It is a multi cultural society possessed of an interesting dualism, embracing English and French.
It has also produced some of the finest short story writers of all such as Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant and Alistair MacLeod, the 2001 Impac winner with No Great Mischief.
Anglo Canadian writers specialise in making art out of the ordinary, adopting a slightly more low key approach to domestic realism than their US neighbours.
There is a further dimension to Canadian writing and that is the impressive influx of talent from elsewhere - India, the Middle East, central and eastern Europe; writers such as Rohinton Mistry and Michael Ondaatje. So a Lebanese Canadian has won with an important book that aspires to high art and has something very shocking to say.
um, koff, 'scuse me? Just about a little provincial prize, oh, shucks. the Trillium for English Fiction, she's been nominated someething like four times, finally won. Barbara Gowdy for Helpless. SssH.
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