The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2013 12:23 AM PST Her book was shortlisted for one of the English-speaking world's most prestigious literary awards. But for two years, she couldn't get a publisher interested in it. BRITISH playwright Deborah Levy had a good year for prose in 2012. Swimming Home, her first novel in 15 years, was in the running for the Man Booker Prize, while Black Vodka, a short story written around the same time, was shortlisted for the noted BBC International Short Story Award. "You wait 20 years to be shortlisted and then two come along in the same week," Levy, 53, says with a laugh from her home in north London. While neither the novel Swimming Home nor the short story Black Vodka won first prize – Hilary Mantel took the £50,000 (RM243,451) Booker for her Tudor-era story Bring Up The Bodies and Miroslav Penkov the £15,000 (RM73,035) award for his tale, East Meets West – South African-born Levy says she is just thrilled by the exposure. After all, it took her two years just to find a publisher for the Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home, a tight, chilling narrative about a holiday gone wrong. "The book was admired, but they felt it wouldn't prosper in a tough economy. I was devastated," she says. The manuscript languished in limbo until independent outfit And Other Stories took a chance and printed it. The subscription-based publisher (readers pay between £20 and £50, or RM9 and RM243, to receive two to six books a year) first sent the book out to just over 100 subscribers. After Swimming Home made it to the longlist last July, "sales increased tenfold", according to a spokesman for the publisher. When the short list was announced in September, e-book sales doubled again. "In a nutshell, Swimming Home sold more units in a fortnight than across 2011," the spokesman adds. And Other Stories has since partnered with major publisher Faber & Faber to reprint the 158-page novel for markets overseas. It is also publishing a collection of Levy's short stories this year. While hallucinogenic in parts, Swimming Home has a real-world origin. Levy is an avid swimmer and, on her way to the beach in Nice, France, several years ago, she encountered a naked young girl on a box of rotten plums. Attempts to help or intervene were rejected, so she found herself revisiting the experience in writing but giving it a different conclusion. Almost the same scene appears in the middle of Swimming Home. Yet, unlike in real life, the elderly woman character forces the young girl to receive medical attention for her condition. "The consequences of her intervention is what the book is about. One of the questions in the book is how do we live with madness, and what is sanity," says Levy. Questions of identity and individuality have interested her for years, since she was nine. Transplanted from South Africa to Britain, she and her younger brother failed to fit into the schoolyard. They decided they had to lose their accents and watched sitcoms on TV to modify their speech patterns. "It ignited my interest in how we constructed our cultural identities," she recalls. Her father, a historian and former political prisoner in apartheid South Africa, and her mother, a secretary, divorced when she was 15. She has two other siblings, a brother and a sister. Levy gravitated towards theatre and studied in the Dartington College of Arts. She wrote plays for various drama troupes including the renowned Royal Shakespeare Company, most of which were about gender and feminism. In Pushing The Prince Into Denmark, written in the 1990s, she gave greater voice to two fictional female characters, Hamlet's mother Gertrude and his love interest Ophelia. But the lack of control in theatre was disturbing. "The writer goes off and writes a script, the script is then interpreted by actors, director, sound guys – you're working together as a whole. I wanted to kind of be in more control and really get my hands on language." So she turned to fiction. Her first novel, Beautiful Mutants, was published in 1986 and her most recent, before Swimming Home, was the 1996 Billy And The Girl, the story of two abandoned adolescents. In between, she raised two children, daughters Sadie, 18 and Leila, 13, with her husband, playwright David Gale. She also wrote many short stories, including those collected in the 2004 compilation Pillow Talk In Europe And Other Places, and several plays for radio and theatre. "There was a lot of writing in those years," says Levy. "This writing will now be seeing the light of day." – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network |
| Posted: 14 Jan 2013 11:36 PM PST The shortlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize is announced. INDIAN author Jeet Thayil and Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng, who last clashed on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, are going head to head again after both authors made the final cut for the Man Asian Literary Prize; the shortlist of five novels was released on Wednesday. Worth US$30,000 (RM90,864), the award goes to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, released in 2012. Thayil and Tan lost the Booker in October 2012 to British author Hilary Mantel, who won for a record-breaking second time for Bring Up The Bodies, her second historical fiction novel in a trilogy about Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell. For this prize, the men face stiff competition from Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, selected for his novel Silent House, a "dark family saga set in a decrepit mansion at a Turkish seaside resort, on the eve of a military coup", according to journalist Maya Jaggi, chair of judges for the Man Asian literary prize. This early work from Pamuk made the list despite being first published nearly three decades ago because it appeared in English for the first time in 2012. "This book written 30 years ago still spoke to us and spoke to some very present issues to do with the way individuals experience the drive for modernity and rapid urbanisation," Jaggi said at a press conference in Hong Kong via video link from London. Thayil is shortlisted for his novel Narcopolis, set in the opium dens of old Bombay, and Tan for The Garden Of Evening Mists, which takes place during the aftermath of WWII and the Japanese occupation of Malaya. The shortlist of five is rounded out by Japanese writer Hiromi Kawakami's The Briefcase, in which the "ambiguous relationship between an office worker nearing 40 and her former literature teacher, a retired widower, is traced with astonishing delicacy and humour", said Jaggi, and Between Clay And Dust by Pakistani author Musharraf Ali Farooqi, the story – and tragedy – of a champion wrestler. "Farooqi's tale is more moving for the spareness and restraint with which it is told," said Jaggi, who is joined on the judging panel by award winning Vietnamese-American novelist Monique Truong and Indian writer Vikram Chandra. She added that Thayil, Tan and Farooqi embodied "Asian writers of a new generation turning to the past in a different way – all younger writers who are looking not simply at the history of their own nations but regional history." Executive director of the award, Prof David Parker added that, "Several of these writers have been celebrated in their own countries and recognised internationally, but never before have we viewed them collectively as Asian writers. "The Man Asian literary prize is the only award that places Asian authors from across the whole breadth of the region side by side and gives readers a fresh perspective on the best fiction from our part (Asian) of the world." The winner will be announced on March 14, with the winning translator, if there is one, to receive US$5,000 (RM15,131). Last year, the award was won by South Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin's Please Look After Mom, which has now sold two million copies worldwide. Once this year's winner is announced, the prize's current sponsor, Britain-based international consultancy Man Group, will step aside (though it will continue to sponsor the Booker Prize). Spokesperson Harrison Kelly said the search for a new sponsor for the award was ongoing, but that the response has been "overwhelmingly positive". "Since October we have been contacted by several Asian-based and global corporations about sponsoring the prize," said Kelly. "In fact we are currently in encouraging talks with potential partners. Of course these things take time and we are yet to finalise anything, but we are thrilled that so many people value the prize as much as we do and see sponsoring us as a unique opportunity to create a stronger presence throughout Asia." – Agencies |
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