Media Release

British Writers Scoop the Pool!

Caryl Phillips has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2004 for A Distant Shore (Secker & Warburg). The 10,000 pounds ($24,500) prize was presented by the Victorian Premier the Hon. Steve Bracks MP at an awards dinner held this evening in the State Library of Victoria’s magnificent Cowen Gallery.

Another British author, Mark Haddon, took out the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2004 for Best First Book worth 3,000 pounds ($7,300) with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Jonathan Cape, UK).

Best Book prize-winner, Caryl Phillips, was born in St Kitts and brought up in Britain. He divides his time between London and New York where he is currently Professor of English at Columbia University.

The Chairperson of the five person pan-Commonwealth judging panel, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, said on behalf of the jury, ‘A Distant Shore speaks to our age and its entropy. The story moves with the converging lives of a middle-aged Midlands woman, declining into bewilderment, and an ‘illegal’ who flees to England from the appalling violence of his homeland. The everyday and the appalling walk hand in hand, with utter conviction. A heartbreaking novel, this book asks whether civilisation can possibly survive.’

The other shortlisted authors in the Best Book category were Melbourne-based Australian Michelle de Kretser, Canada’s Frances Itani and South Africa’s Damon Galgut.

Describing the Best First Book winner, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Chris Wallace-Crabbe said,  ‘This is one of those rare works that changes our sense of what fiction can do, what language can achieve. Working through a boy’s autistic consciousness, it offers readers a vivid, comical, plangent drama, obliquely echoing Sherlock Holmes. More than this, it illuminates the ways in which we all perceive and think.’

The other shortlisted Best First Book authors were Lebanese-based Australian Nada Awar Jarrar, Kate Taylor from Canada and South African Diane Awerbuck. 

The Commonwealth Writers Prize, established in 1987, is one of the most important literary prizes in the world. To be eligible, authors must be citizens of one of the Commonwealth’s 53 member countries. It is financed and sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation, an inter-governmental organisation funded by Commonwealth governments to support civil society across the Commonwealth. The prize is managed by Cumberland Lodge in association with Booktrust. The 2004 prize program is hosted by the State Library of Victoria. Each year the award ceremony is held in a different Commonwealth country.

The impressive list of previous regional winners includes Australians Sonya Hartnett, David Malouf, Peter Carey and Richard Flanagan, Nobel Prize Laureates VS Naipaul and Nadine Gordimer, and also Margaret Atwood, Vikram Seth, Louis de Bernières, Rohinton Mistry and JM Coetzee.

The winning novels:

Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore  (Secker & Warburg)

From its opening words, 'England has changed', Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore explores vast themes - cultural dislocation, the anxiety of belonging, migration and social change - through the prism of individual lives. Set in a village in the north of England, the novel describes a faltering encounter between two solitary and seemingly very different individuals: Dorothy, a primly repressed retired schoolteacher in her fifties, and Solomon, the mysterious African caretaker in his thirties who drives her on hospital visits.

But as we gradually learn their stories, it seems both feel alienated and are seeking a kind of asylum, Dorothy from a broken marriage and guilt at abandoning a needy sister; Solomon, an ex-soldier, from civil war and the slaughter of his family. Their trauma and mental disintegration are skilfully narrated through a fractured narrative, memory lapses and partial recollection. The ordeal of Solomon’s clandestine journey to England is masterly and atmospheric. His cold welcome in an immigration detention cell and his violent scapegoating in England ironically echo the tribalism he fled in Africa. Restrained but deeply compassionate, lucid and modest in its prose, the novel links one of Europe’s major political and moral challenges, the presence of vilified asylum seekers, to Phillips’ larger vision of a society transformed by migration but confused and riven as to its identity.

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Jonathan Cape)

Christopher Boone, who tells the story of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a narrator like no other. A 15 year old boy with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism, he knows all the capitals of the world and every prime number up to 7507, but will not eat anything yellow, hates to be touched, and has never been further on his own than the end of his street.

As part of his condition, high intelligence and powers of observation, and mathematical precocity, co-exist with an inability to read other peoples’ emotions or understand their jokes. When distressed he is found to curl up on the floor, groaning and covering his ears. An admirer of Sherlock Holmes, he turns detective when he finds his neighbour’s dog dead on the lawn, stabbed with a garden fork. In the course of the murder mystery that follows, he uncovers not only whodunnit but a world of adult passions and intrigue in his own family, as well as discovering his own capacity for independence.

The judges of the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize pan-Commonwealth panel, chaired by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, are:

Africa: Professor Andries Oliphant (South Africa)
Caribbean & Canada: Professor Marjorie Thorpe (Trinidad & Tobago)Eurasia: Dr Sanjukta Dasgupta (India)
South East Asia & South Pacific: Mr Graham Beattie (New Zealand)

Regional winners for the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize
 

Best Book

Africa	Damon Galgut (South Africa) The Good Doctor  (Viking, South Africa)
Caribbean & Canada	Frances Itani (Canada)  Deafening  (Flamingo, Canada)
Eurasia	Caryl Phillips (UK)         A Distant Shore (Secker & Warburg, UK)
SE Asia & South Pacific	Michelle de Kretser (Australia) The Hamilton Case (Knopf, Australia)

                        

Best First Book

Africa	Diane Awerbuck (South Africa)  Gardening at Night (Secker & Warburg, UK)
Caribbean & Canada	Kate Taylor (Canada)   Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (Doubleday, Canada)
Eurasia	Mark Haddon (UK)       The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time  (Jonathan Cape, UK)
SE Asia & South Pacific	Nada Awar Jarrar (Australia)         Somewhere, Home (William Heinemann, UK)

Last year's Best Book prize was awarded to Canadian author Austin Clarke for The Polished Hoe (Thomas Allen, Canada).  The Best First Book Prize went to UK writer Sarah Hall for her debut novel, Haweswater (Faber and Faber, UK).

More information is available at  www.commonwealthwriters.com