2006 Winners
2006 Winners
OVERALL 2006 WINNERS
Best Book The Secret River Kate Grenville, Australia (Text Publishing)
Book Synopsis
The Secret River is set in the early nineteenth century, on what was then the frontier: the Hawkesbury River. William Thornhill, an illiterate Thames bargeman and a man of quick temper but deep feelings, steals a load of timber and is transported to New South Wales in 1806. Like many of the convicts, he's pardoned within a few years and settles on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. The Hawkesbury is at the extreme edge of settlement at that time and normal rules don't apply. However he gets the land, it's prime riverfront acreage. It looks certain to make him rich. There's just one problem with that land: it's already owned. It's been part of the territory of the Darug people for perhaps forty thousand years. They haven' left fences or roads or houses, but they live on that land and use it, just as surely as Thornhill's planning to do. They aren't going to hand over their land without a fight. Spears may be primitive weapons, but settlers know that they can kill a man as surely as a ball of lead from a musket. As he realises all this, Thornhill faces an impossible choice. Some of his neighbours - Smasher Sullivan, Sagitty Birtles - regard the Darug as hardly human, savages with as little right to land as a dog. When the Darug object to being driven off, those settlers have no compunction in shooting or poisoning them.
Other neighbours make a different choice, and find ways to co-exist with the Darug. Blackwood has made a family among them. Mrs Herring "gives them WHEN they ask". Hostility between blacks and whites gradually escalates. Finally a group of settlers decides to go out and "settle" the Darug for once and for all. Will Thornhill join them? The decision he makes is with him for the rest of his life. The Secret River plunges the reader into the experience of frontier life. What was it like - moment to moment, day by day - to have been in that situation? It doesn't judge any of the characters or their actions, only invites the reader to ask the question, "What might I have done IN that situation?"
Biography
Kate Grenville was born in Sydney, Australia. Her novel The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize, Britain's most valuable literary award, and became a long-running best-seller. Her other works of fiction have been published to acclaim in Australia and overseas and have won state and national awards. Much-loved novels such as Lilian's Story (1985), Dark Places (1995) and Joan Makes History (1988) have become classics, admired by critics and general readers alike.
Lilian's Story was filmed starring Ruth Cracknell, Toni Collette and Barry Otto. Dreamhouse was filmed under the title Traps, starring Jacqueline MacKenzie.
Kate Grenville's books have been published in translation in seven languages.
She lives in Sydney with her family.
Best First Book, Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement Mark McWatt, Guyana (Peepal Tree Press)
Book Synopsis
A group of sixth formers vandalize an exclusive Georgetown club on the day of their school leaving, coincidentally also the day of their country's independence. Several of their parents think a lesson is in order and the semblance of a trial is organized. The sentences they are given are suspended provided that they fulfil the task set by their English teacher, who has interceded on their behalf. Each must write a short story that says something about the newly independent Guyana.
Years later, Mark McWatt, one of the group, is handed the papers of his old school friend, Victor Nunes, who has disappeared, feared drowned, in the Guyanese interior. The papers contain some of the stories, written before the project collapsed when the group realized the trial was a hoax. As a tribute to Victor Nunes, McWatt decides to collect the rest of the stories from his friends.
Suspended Sentences is a tour-de-force of invention. The stories, entertaining in their own right, whether supposedly written by eighteen year olds or in later adult life, work not only like Chaucerian tales to reveal their teller, but have an affectionately satirical take on the nature of Guyanese fiction making. By ranging across Guyanese ethnicities, gender and time in the purported authorship of these stories, McWatt creates a richly dialogic work of fiction.
And when McWatt apparently slips some of his own biography into a brilliantly comic story of betrayal (that ends in the victim's suicide, but told by another member of the group, the implications of the collection's subtitle, Fictions of atonement become teasingly ambiguous.
Biography
Professor Mark McWatt was born in Guyana in 1947. He took his first degree at the University of Toronto, then went to Leeds University to complete a Ph.D. He is currently Head of the English Department at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus, Barbados. He has published two collections of poetry, Interiors (1989) and The Language of Eldorado (1994) that won the Guyana Prize. He has published widely in journals on aspects of Caribbean literature and is joint editor of the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005).
2006 REGIONAL WINNERS
AFRICA
Best Book The Sun by Night Benjamin Kwakye, Ghana, (Africa World Press)
Book Synopsis
The Sun by Night unravels the secrets surrounding the death of an Accra prostitute. Framed around a court case involving Manu, a respectable and wealthy businessman, it is a gripping tale of murder, courtroom shenanigans, and intense societal conflicts. Among others, the novel explores themes and tensions of familial and traditional commitments, individual freedom, marriage and love, and class exploitation to weave an enduring tapestry of great human value. Set in a country still grappling with the heavy legacies of the colonial experience, The Sun by Night combines old and new to demonstrate that the quest for truth and justice belongs to each one of us.
Best First Book Tropical Fish-Stories out of Entebbe, Uganda, Doreen Baingana (University of Massachusetts Press)
Book Synopsis
Tropical Fish is a collection of linked short stories that explore the coming of age of three African sisters. Introspective and personal, the stories reveal the unexpected ambiguities of the young women's lives. The setting is the lush beauty of Uganda and the background is the aftermath of Idi Amin's dictatorship. But even in such trying circumstances, the stories show that people everywhere face the same basic human struggle to understand themselves, their world, and their place in it.
Each story develops the theme of exploration and discovery as the sisters mature and their interior and exterior lives expand. The youngest sister, Christine, becomes aware at an early age of the bittersweet dynamics of family love and later grapples with romantic and erotic, if problematic, love. Her explorations lead her across racial lines, when she has an affair with a British expatriate in the title story. What is initially an act of curiosity brings forth questions of racial and gender identity. Eager to stitch together a new pattern for her life, Christina ventures to another continent, North America, where she attempts to create a new home and a new self.
CANADA/CARIBBEAN
Best Book Alligator Lisa Moore, Canada, (House of Anansi Press)
Book Synopsis
Lisa Moore's stirring first novel moves with the confident swiftness of a gator in attack mode: Meet Colleen, a seventeen-year-old would-be eco-terrorist, who barrels down the rocky road of adolescence while her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly's sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. Frank, a benevolent young man without a family, believes that his success will come from his hot-dog stand ? a business he's desperate to protect from sociopathic sailor Valentin. Meanwhile, Isobel, a weak, self-absorbed actress, has fallen under the spell of the sailor, who threatens everyone he encounters.
Alligator is a remarkable book, a story that examines the ruthlessly reptilian and the painfully human sides of all of us. Lisa Moore's astonishing talent is as visible in her prose as in the relationships she brings to life on the page, which Maclean's has called "? needle-TO-the-eye sharp," and in her characters themselves, which the Edmonton Journal dubbed "unforgettable."
Best First Book Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement Mark McWatt, Guyana (Peepal Tree Press)
See above for Book synopsis and Biography
EUROPE AND SOUTH ASIA
Best Book On Beauty Zadie Smith, UK, (Penguin Books)
Book Synopsis
Professor Howard Belsey has done something stupid. And what is more it is the stupid something which men his age seem programmed by cliché to act out. Exiled in his own home by the hurt and anger of his wife, Kiki, and the disapproval of his three kids, Jerome, Zora and Levi, Howard is about to see his role in the family further undermined by the arrival in their East Coast college town of Wellington, Mass, of his nemesis, British academic Monty Kipps.
Between the families of Belsey and Kipps there is a gulf - political, ideological, social and artistic - and that is the way Howard would like to keep it. But male lust and female friendship are powerful things, and the children and wives of Belsey and Kipps seem drawn to each other in spite of paternal rancour. Jerome falls in love with Vee, Kipps'sexually manoeuvring daughter, and Kiki, racially and emotionally isolated in liberal academia, discovers a rapport with his generous Caribbean wife, Carlene.
On Beauty is a work of mature social comedy, a beautifully judged portrait of two families, two countries and two deeply held, but opposing, belief systems. In her third novel Zadie Smith embraces the big themes which mark her out as one of the twenty-first century's most distinctive voices: Mozart and Rembrandt, poetry and hip hop, love and sex, race and class, truth and beauty.
Best First Book Lazy Eye- Donna Daley-Clarke, UK, (Simon and Schuster)
Book Synopsis
At nineteen, Geoffhurst is getting along just fine - he's got his own flat away from his family, his eight jars to divide his dole cheque (one for each day; one for saving), his standing order at Madame Wong's Chinese Restaurant. Then a reporter from the local newspaper offers to pay him to tell his story - the story of what happened eight years ago, when something happened that even with his lazy eye he couldn't help but stare right in the face. In the long, hot, legendary summer of '76, Geoffhurst's life was full of superheroes. His father was one of the first black professional footballers, his six-foot mother was the most glamorous woman in the neighbourhood and his aunt was a witch. His alter-ego was the Hulk, and his gang was the Four Aces. If he could get through the heat, he could get through anything.
But sometimes even superheroes meet their match, and that year the storms that cracked the skies spelt more than just the end of summer; they spelt the end of Geoffhurst's childhood.
SOUTH EAST ASIA AND SOUTH PACIFIC
Best Book The Secret River Kate Grenville, Australia (Text Publishing)
See above for Book Synopsis and Biography
Best First Book The Harmony Silk Factory Tash Aw, Malaysia, (Harper Collins)
Book Synopsis
Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman - a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer - whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley's most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel's narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era.
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