CWP Podcasts
Commonwealth Writers' Prize Podcasts
2007 Overall Best Book winner
Listen to Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner of the Overall Best Book Lloyd 
Jones as he talks about his novel Mister Pip. Music on the podcast is provided by Jeff Wahl. Incidental music is Piano Miniature by Steve Lawson and Jez Carr, and drifting by Steve Lawson
Lloyd Jones Podcast
Listen to Lloyd Jones reading an extract from Mister Pip by clicking on the link below
Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones new novel is set mainly in a small village on Bougainville, where Matilda attends the school set up by the only white man in the village, Mr Watts. By his own admission hes not much of a teacher and proceeds to educate the children by reading them Great Expectations. Matilda falls in love with the novel and the promise of the next chapter is what keeps her going. Pip's story protects her from the horror of what is happening around her helicopters menacing the skies above the village and rebel raids on the ground.
After several visits to the village by soldiers, the book goes missing and is then destroyed. Mr Watts encourages the children to retell the story, the whole being constructed from their remembered fragments. Later, when she has fled the island for Australia, Matilda reaches for a copy of Great Expectations in the school library and realises that Mr Watts was reading them his own version of the text - another invention of the original.
Mister Pip is a love song to the power of the imagination and of storytelling. It shows how books can change lives.
Lloyd Jones
Lloyd Jones is a fiction writer drawn to a sympathetic portrayal of ordinary middle-class life, a suburban realist who simultaneously challenges realism, subverts fictional norms, defies categories and writes narratives which are challenging, original and in some cases controversial.
He was born in Lower Hutt, which has remained a frequent setting and subject, and graduated from Victoria University, then working as a journalist and consultant, but always as a committed writer. He has continued to live in the Hutt Valley or Eastbourne, apart from several periods in USA and in 1988 as the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow at Menton. He has also held the Scholarship in Letters and other awards.
2007 Overall Best First Book Winner
Listen to Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner of the Overall Bes
t First Book D Y Béchard as he talks about his novel Vandal Love. Music on the podcast is provided by Jeff Wahl.
DY Béchard Podcast
Listen to DY Bechard reading an extract from Vandal Love by clicking on the link below
Vandal Love
Vandal Love follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America, and through the twentieth century, as they struggle to find their place in the world.
A family curse - a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship - causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. Book I of Vandal Love follows the giants' line, exploring Jude Hervé's career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1960s, his escape from that brutal life alone with his baby daughter Isa, and her eventual decision to enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man.
Book II traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of unifying love. François searches for years for his missing father; his own son, Harvey, flees from modern society into spiritual quests. But none of the Hervés can abandon their longing for a place where they might find others like themselves.
D.Y. Béchard
D.Y. Béchard was born in British Columbia to French-Canadian and American parents. He has since lived throughout Canada and the United States. His novel, Vandal Love, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He currently divides his time between Montréal, Québec, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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 | 2007 Overall Winners Release |
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| Mister Pip Website |
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| Related Documents | |
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| Lloyd Jones- extract from Mister Pip 1119 KB) |
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| DY Bechard- extract from Vandal Love 1290 KB) |
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