Nicholson’s The Elephant Keeper was one of the most eye-catching. The judges described his book about a stable boy who develops a deepening relationship with Jenny, an elephant, as “an unusual and absorbing story – a real discovery.” It was one of a record number of 155 entries for the category with Mantel’s bestselling doorstopper about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, unsurprisingly one of the four shortlisted books.
Little-known novelist vies with big names for Costa prize
In News on November 25, 2009 at 3:33 amBooks of the decade: your best books of 2001
In Authors on November 20, 2009 at 1:31 am
It was the year our era began, with unprecedented abruptness, in obscene rolling news. But, blessedly, literature moves at a much slower pace, and it would be some years before the convulsions of September 2001 began to resound in serious fiction. Saturday, Ian McEwan’s post-9/11 novel, was four years away, and his Booker disappointment this year was for Atonement.
Book Review: The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (Review by Zafar Anjum, S’pore)
In Reviews on October 29, 2009 at 1:39 am
The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English
By Rajeev S. Patke and Philip Holden
Routledge, 272 pp
It can be argued that Southeast Asian Writing in English has not achieved as much attention as African Writing in English or Indian Writing in English, even though English as a language reached most parts of the world wave after wave as a result of colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Manila have been major outposts under British and American colonialism, but the output in English from these big Asian cities has not made much impact on the global literary landscape, the same way that writings from India or Africa have. Where is Southeast Asia’s answer to Midnight Children or a House for Mr. Biswas or Things Fall Apart?
