Philip Roth: The Man Booker International, 2011, Winner

Philip Roth, the highly acclaimed American novelist has been awarded with the  prestigious Man Booker International Prize, in the process he shrugged off competition from 12 other contenders, including India-born Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry.

Roth, 78, one of the world’s most prolific, celebrated and controversial writers won the biennial Prize worth sixty thousand pound. However, events preceding the actual announcement of his name has taken some sheen out of his glorious achievement.  Carmen Callil, one of the panel judges, walked out of the jury saying  ’I don’t rate him as a writer at all.’  “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe”.

Roth shot to fame with his 1959 novel Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrayal of Jewish-American life that earned him the National Book Award. The Portnoy’s Complaint transformed Roth into a major literary celebrity. The late 1990’s trilogy comprising the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastora’l(1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), has left little doubt about him being the true literary genius.

The award is a tribute to the man who has so meticulously penned down a humorous, satirical ways of Jewish-American life through his superlative imaginations.

This time it’s the Pulitzer. Once again an author of Indian origin, Siddhartha Mukherjee, has taken the literary world by storm. A New York-based cancer physician and graduate of Stanford, Oxford and Harvard, Mukherjee won the prestigious Pulitzer prize in the general non fiction category for his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A biography of Cancer.

Other finalists in the category were “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain,” by Nicholas Carr (W.W. Norton & Company), “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History,” by S.C. Gwynne (Scribner).

Mukherjee’s book has been described as an “astonishingly lucid and eloquent” chronicle of the deadly disease. It presents a “profoundly humane” biography of the malady, starting from its first documented appearance thousands of years ago.

The Pulitzer citation calls it, “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”

Meanwhile, Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad” won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and Ron Chernow won the Pulitzer Prize in biography for “Washington: A Life.”

Congratulations Siddhartha Mukherjee!

For free doorstep delivery of The Emperor of all Maladies, visit INDIAreads Online Library cum Bookstore.

Read a free excerpt of The Emperor of All Maladies.

Rohinton Mistry, the Indian- born Canadian author has been nominated for Man Booker International Prize 2011.  He is widely known for his three acclaimed novels “Such a Long Journey” (1991),” A Fine Balance”(1995) and “Family Matters”(2002). All these three books have been shortlisted for the Booker prize before but eventually could not cross the final hurdle. The biennial Man Booker International Prize is awarded for an author’s body of works whereas the Booker is given every year for a single book.

Mistry was born in Mumbai in 1952, he migrated to Canada in 1975 after obtaining an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Economics. Mistry took a job in bank for a while before he moved back to studies. He also possesses a degree in English and Philosophy. However Mistry’s first book was a collection of short stories named “Tales from Firozsha Baag” (1987). “Scream” (2006) is his latest novel to hit the stands.

Mistry has also been honoured with the  Commonwealth Writers’ Prize,  Canada-based Governor General’s Award, the Giller Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.

Buy/Rent novels by Rohinton Mistry from INDIAreads-online bookstore cum library. Register Now.

It was one crazy weekend, or should I say extended weekend. National Book Trust had, for the first time, organized a Book Bazaar on Delhi University premises and we were there too. When we took up the stall, a lot of people shook their heads – unwise decision. Students don’t buy books. A) They are just not interested. I mean who spends on books when you have the internet and the CCDs, not to mention the endless shopping trips. B) Tehy never have the money to buy books. C) It’s too hot, it’s the weekend and the idea is just crazy.

This post is specially for the skeptics. Yes it was hot, gosh we were almost dehydrated sitting in the sun for hours, not to mention the tans and the endless mosquito bites. It was also a weekend and yet students thronged to the book bazaar to see books, to browse through them and ….TO BUY BOOKS. It was such a wonderful feeling to see college students coming  together, discussing books, getting excited over them and then putting together their money to buy them (or to rent them by taking library membership). And no, contrary to the advise we had received they weren’t buying chick lit or some random novels. Nope we sold copies and copies of Mister God, this is Anna, Discovery of India, The Motorcycle Diaries, The Alchemist (gosh this one never fails to sell), A Brief History of Time, Relativity Simply explained. Works of Khushwant Singh, Amitav Ghosh, Stephen Hawking, Eric Hobsbawm were popular. Current Affairs books were in demand as were personality development ones.

So next time, don’t ever doubt the reading skills of Gen X. Indeed India does read

Anand Pai, the man who introduced millions of Indians to their history and roots died of a heart attack on February 24, 2011.

Pai was the man who created the Amar Chitra Katha series which currently sells 3 million copies in a year. The idea behind the series was born when Pai noticed that children in a quiz show were able to answer  questions on Greek mythology but were clueless when it came to questions on Indian epics, like the Ramayana. Thus was born the idea of a series that would, in simple terms, introduce children to great personalities, events and legends of India. When Pai first came up with the idea, he was rejected by nearly all the publishing houses except for G. L. Mirchandani of India Book House. Thus began a partnership that created books that have been devoured and adored by millions.

In 1969 Pai started Rang Rekha Features, India’s first comic book and cartoon syndicate. In April 1980 he brought out the first issue of Tinkle, a monthly comic which would become the childhood companion for millions of Indian kids. He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at India’s first ever Comic Convention held in Delhi last week.

Surprisingly, the man who went on to redefine Indian publishing by starting desi comics was a degree holder in physics, chemistry, and chemical technology. He was born in Karkala, Karnataka and lost both his parents at the age of 2. It is said that Pai personally answered all the letters from his young readers who affectionately called him uncle Pai.

Rest in peace Uncle Pai!

Here’s good news for Blyton fans. An archivist in Newcastle has discovered a hitherto unpublished 180 page manuscript of Mr Tumpy’s caravan, a fantasy novel by Enid Blyton. It is believed that the manuscript was a part of the collection auctioned by the family of Blyton’s eldest daughter last September.

The manuscript that tells the tales of a thinking, walking magic caravan is sure to excite Blyton fans the world over. It is available for viewing at the Seven Stories Bookstore in Newcastle.

Are you an Enid Blyton fan? Do you believe that Blyton changed your childhood or thinking? How and why? Share your favourite Blyton anecdote, novel or character with us and tells us why you are rooting for them. Top three entries will win an Enid Blyton each. Hurry, contest closes on March 20, 2011.

Winners will be announced on March 22, 2011. For details see, the INDIAreads Enid Blyton Contest.

After much speculation the name of this year’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature is out and luckily for the Swedish Academy, it is a good choice! Peruvian author, essayist and journalist Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Prize “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.

Often regarded as Latin America’s most widely read author of the “boom” period, Llosa rose to fame in 1963 with his debut The Time of the Hero. he was only 26 then.  His books span a variety of genre – be it murder mysteries, comedies, historical novels and politcal thrillers, yet  they are influenced by his impressions of the working of his native Peruvian society. Lately however, he has shifted to wider international themes and issues and has dappled with post modernism. His new novel, “El Sueño del Celta” (“The Celt’s Dream”), is due out in Spanish next month

Born in a middle class Peruvian family on March 28, 1836, Llosa spent the early years of his life on a Bolivian cotton farm with his mother and her family. It was at the age of ten that he met his father for the first time. At the age of fourteen he joined the Leoncio Prado Military Academy but left it a year before graduation. He published his first short story in 1957. Llosa has also taken active interest in politics moving from the left to the right. In 1990 he ran for the presidency of Peru as the representative of a centre-right coalition.

Peter Carey, Emma Donoghue, Damon Galgut, Howard Jacobson, Andrea Levyand Tom McCarthy have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010, announced Andrew Motion, former poet laureate and the Chair of judges. These authors have been selected from a long list of 16 for the following works:

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue, Room (Picador – Pan Macmillan)

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books – Grove Atlantic)

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy, The Long Song (Headline Review - Headline Publishing Group)

Tom McCarthy, C (Jonathan Cape – Random House)

The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced on Tuesday 12 October at a dinner at London’s Guildhall and the winner will take home a cheque for £50,000. Each of the short listed authors will get £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their shortlisted book. The Prize was won by Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall last year.

So, who are these authors who have been short listed….Here’s a little information on the short listed authors and their works.

Peter Carey: Australian novelist and short story novelist Peter Carey is the only author, apart from J.M. Coetzee to have won the Booker Prize twice. In 1988, he got the Booker for 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and won in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. Should he win this year’s prize, he would be the first author to have won this coveted award thrice. Carey started his career with advertising and started writing novels in 1964. However it was only in 1974 that his first work was published. He has already won the Miles Franklin Award thrice and has a postage stamp released in his honor. His short listed entry, Parrot and Olivier in America “is a dazzlingly inventive reimagining of Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous journey, brilliantly evoking the Old World colliding with the New. Above all, it is a wildly funny and deeply tender portrait of two men who come to form an almost impossible friendship, and a completely improbable work of art.” (www.petercarey.com)

Emma Donoghue: Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, Emma is a playwright and novelist who took Canadian citizenship in 2004. Her 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award (earlier known as the American Book Association’s Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award) and in 2000, she received the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction for Slammerkin. Her 2008 novel The Sealed Letter, was joint winner of the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.The  youngest of eight children, Emma earned her PhD in English from the University of Cambridge. Emma’s books often explore themes of sexuality, gay and lesbian relationships.

Her entry for this year’s book is about five-year-old-Jack, to whom his eleven-by-eleven-foot room is the world. It’s where he was born, it’s where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn.  Room is home to Jack, but to his mom, it’s the prison where she’s been held since she was nineteen-for seven long years.  Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this tiny space. But Jack’s curiosity is building alongside her own desperation-and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely. Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience-and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. (details @ http://www.roomthebook.com/)

Source: www.fanfiction.co.uk

Damon Galgut: Born in Pretoria in 1963, Damon Galgut is a playwright and a novelist who was diagnosed with cancer at the age of six. As he lay in the hospital for long stretches, his relatives would read him stories and it was there that his love for story telling developed. At the age of 17, his debut novel, A Sinless Season was published . In 1991, he won South Africa’s leading literary prize and in 2003 his book, The Good Doctor (written in a hotel room in Goa) was short listed for the Booker. His entry for the Booker, is a novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion; the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love and for a place to call home. “A young man makes three journeys that take him through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way – including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge – he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man’s best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his life.” (source: www.themanbookerprize.com)

Howard Jacobson: An award winning British author and journalist, Jacobson is best known for comic novels that deal with Jewish dilemmas. During the 1970s he taught English at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the West Midlands, and this experience led him to write his first novel, Coming From Behind in 1983. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for The Mighty Walzer and his Kalooki Nights was longlisted for the Booker.

His entry for the Booker, The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment. It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses. And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.

On July 11, this week, two award winning authors of Indian origin celebrated their birthday. Join us as we try and learn a little more about these writers who have done INDIA proud and who have kept us engaged with their thoughts, observations, creativity and writing skills.

AMITAV GHOSH

Born in Kolkatta on July 11, 1956, Ghosh studied at the Doon School and St Stephens College New Delhi before getting a D.Phil in Social Anthropology from Oxford University. Ghosh’s first job was with the Indian Express in New Delhi. In 1986 he published his first novel, the Circle of Reason and won the Prix Medici Estranger, one of France’s top literary awards. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature.  Since 2005, he has been a visiting professor at Harvard University.

Ghosh is married to writer Deborah Baker and has two children, Lila and Nayan. He commutes between Kolkatta, Goa (where he has bought a house) and Brooklyn.

Often categorised as historical fiction, Ghosh’s works show an intense understanding of human nature.  His characters are living, breathing people whom his readers, meet, understand and befriend. His prose, original. His themes, unique and cross-cultural. In his own words, “My work is about people who find themselves in many different kinds of predicament, historical and contemporary…my most important characters are never those who see things in black and white; nor do they resort to easy judgements. In my view all important ethical and political judgements are difficult; what is more they are always specific to the situation at hand.”

Ghosh’s  novels bring alive different times and places and provide readers with rich cultural and sociological experiences. Where does reality end and fiction begin? The blending is so perfect, so seamless that it is almost impossible to tell. This perhaps explains the string of awards won by him. The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s most prestigious literary award.The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997. The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001.  The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy. Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize. In 2007, Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri.   Earlier this year Ghosh along with Margaret Atwood was awarded the Dan David prize, which found him in the midst of a huge controversy.

JHUMPA LAHIRI

Born in London on July 11, 1967, Jhumpa had been writing stories in her notebooks since her school days. However, it was only when she took up a research assistantship with a non-profit organisation in Cambridge, that her life as a writer began. In her own words, “For the first time I had a computer of my own at my desk, and I started writing fiction again, more seriously. I used to stay late and come in to work on stories. Eventually I had enough material to apply to the creative writing program at Boston University. But once that ended, unsure of what to do next, I went on to graduate school and got my Ph.D. In the process, it became clear to me that I was not meant to be a scholar. It was something I did out of a sense of duty and practicality, but it was never something I loved. I still wrote stories on the side, publishing things here and there. The year I finished my dissertation, I was also accepted to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and that changed everything. It was something of a miracle. In seven months I got an agent, sold a book, and had a story published in The New Yorker. I’ve been extremely lucky. It’s been the happiest possible ending.”

In 2000, her debut short stories collection, The Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize., the PEN/Hemingway Award and The New Yorker Debut of the Year. She wrote her debut novel, the Namesake in 2003 and it was adapted into a popular movie, directed by Mira Nair. Her second collection of short stories, The Unaccustomed Earth, was released in 2008 and debuted as number 1 on the New York Best sellers list.

The daughter of Bengali Indian immigrants, Jhumpa was born as Nilanjana Sudeshna but became known by her pet name as it was easier to pronounce.. Her family moved to the US when she was just three and Lahiri considers herself to be an American. She obtained a number of degrees from Boston University including a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She is currently a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by US President Barack Obama. Jhumpa is married to journalist Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush and lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Jhumpa’s stories are often autobiographical and dwell upon the dilemmas, trials and anxieties of her parents, friends, neighbours and other immigrants.  Written in simple English, her stories are popular for their sensitivity and their exploration of immigrant psychology and behaviour.

image courtesy jeanxreviews

We all know him as the man who made us give a look closely at the Monalisa and scan The Last Supper for hidden clues. But before there was The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown was on a different career path. Here’s a look at some unknown and rather interesting facts about the bestselling author.

• Brown graduated from Amherst with a double major in Spanish and English in 1986, after which he turned to music, creating effects with synthesizer, and self-producing a children’s cassette entitled Synth Animals which included a collection of tracks such as Happy frogs and suzuki elephants.

• In 1991, he moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter and pianist.

• Dan Brown’s first three novels met with little success. It was his fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, which hit the New York Times Best Seller List in its first week in release in 2003.

• The Da Vinci Code’s success led to Dan Brown’s earlier novels flying off book shelves. In 2004, all four of Dan Brown’s novels hit the New York Times Best Seller List in the same week.

• In 2005, Dan Brown made TIME Magazine’s list of the One Hundred Most Influential People of the Year. Brown also placed at Number Twelve in Forbe’s Magazine’s 2005 Celebrity 100 List. The Times estimated that Dan Brown’s income from The DaVinci Code sales alone was in excess of $250 million.

• In 2006, his novel The Da Vinci Code was released as a film by Columbia Pictures. One of the songs, “phiano”, which Brown wrote and performed, was listed as part of the film’s soundtrack.

• The fictional Langdon’’s alama mater is Phillips Exter Academy, the same school that Brown attended.

• Brown has told fans that he uses inversion therapy to help with writer’s block. He uses gravity boots and says, “hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.”