Courtesy of the International Booker Prize Reviewed by Leighan Renaud Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim Author Cheon Myeong-kwan and the Whale book jacket. I was unsure of what to expect, but I found Condé’s novel charming and full of heart. It engages with questions of belief, philosophy and politics, and brings together a range of captivating characters from across the New World as Pascal grapples with his reputation as a new Messiah. The novel, translated from French to English by Condé’s husband Richard Philcox, is full of wit, humour and allusion. He travels the earth looking for his biological father and grapples with questions about his own purpose – a journey that closely mirrors that of Jesus in the New Testament. What follows is Pascal’s journey to himself. This year's televised ceremony at the BBC's Broadcasting House in London was attended by all the shortlisted authors, after Covid restrictions led to video appearances last year.Opt out or contact us anytime. "Great Circle", by US novelist Maggie Shipstead, 38, tells the story of a fictional female pilot hoping to fly around the globe pole-to-pole, interwoven with first-person narrative from a Hollywood starlet playing her role. "The Fortune Men", by British-Somali author Nadifa Mohamed, 40, is based on the true story of a Somali sailor wrongly convicted of murder in Cardiff's multicultural port in the 1950s. Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam, 33, in his second novel, "A Passage North", focuses on the traumatic legacy of the country's almost three-decade civil war that ended in 2009. Other books look back at 20th-century history. Powers was shortlisted in 2018 and then landed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction two years ago for his tree-themed book "The Overstory".Īnother US writer, Patricia Lockwood, 39, was nominated for her debut novel, "No One Is Talking About This", featuring a 30-something obsessed with social media who has to deal with a shocking medical diagnosis. Other finalists included US writer Richard Powers, 64, whose novel "Bewilderment" is about an astrobiologist struggling to cope with his young son's behavioural problems. The New Yorker called it "remarkable", while South Africa's Sunday Times said "it's astonishing how much history Galgut packs into this short novel". Maya Jasanoff, chair of this year's judges, lauded all the final contenders but singled out "The Promise" for its "incredible originality and fluidity of voice" and as a book "really dense with historical and metaphorical significance".Ĭritics have agreed. The winner receives a £50,000 ($68,000) prize as well as a career-changing boost in sales and public profile. The prize, whose previous recipients include Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Hilary Mantel, is one of the leading literary awards for novels written in English. Galgut triumphed from a competitive and diverse shortlist of authors also spanning Sri Lanka, Britain and the United States, whose novels covered topics and tales from female pilots to modern day social media. Galgut's win came just hours after the news that another African writer, 31-year-old Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, had won the Goncourt, France's top literary prize. That "would suggest that perhaps the volume is going up in Africa," he said. Speaking to journalists a little later, he pointed out that this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature had gone to another African writer, Zanzibar-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. "This has been a great year for African writing and I'd like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent that I'm part of," he said. Speaking immediately after winning the Booker, Galgut paid homage to his home continent. The white South African writer has said he wanted the critically acclaimed novel to show how "the passing of time" impacts a family, a country, its politics and "notions of justice" - all while also exploring mortality. "The Promise", about a white family with a farm outside Pretoria - where Galgut grew up - was tipped to land the prize ahead of the announcement late Wednesday. "It's taken a long while to get here and now that I have, I kind of feel that I shouldn't be here," added the author, who wrote his first novel aged 17.
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