The Malaysian Insider :: Books
The Malaysian Insider :: Books |
| Mantel wins Costa award for ‘Bring Up The Bodies’ Posted: 30 Jan 2013 02:28 AM PST  'Bring up the Bodies' by Hilary Mantel. – Copyright HarperCollins The judges described the book, the second part of a planned trilogy about king Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell, as "head and shoulders" above the other contenders. Mantel, 60, scooped the £30,000 (RM144,901) prize, while the other writers on the shortlist, made up from the other four category winners, received £5,000 each. "I'm happy and I shall make it my business to try to write more books that will be worth more prizes," she said. "Sometimes it feels like it's getting away from me, yet at the same time I'm still contained within it because I have the third book to write. "I'm excited about it I want to know what happens, I want to know what I'll say." Mantel made literary history in October 2012 by becoming the first woman and the first British author to be a two-time winner of the Booker Prize for fiction, one of the highest profile awards in English-language literature. The Costa Book Award, formerly the Whitbread Literary Awards, was established in 1971 to celebrate contemporary British and Irish writing. A panel of writers, actors and broadcasters choose the most enjoyable books from the past year. Broadcaster Jenni Murray, who chaired the nine-strong judging panel, said they had made a unanimous decision. "This is a very difficult prize to judge because there are five categories and they are so different: poetry, children's, biography, first novel and novel," she said. "One book simply stood head and shoulders, more than head and shoulders – on stilts – above the rest. "We couldn't allow the number of times it has already been lauded to affect our decision; it was quite simply the best book." – AFP/Relaxnews |
| ‘Finnegans Wake’ is new Chinese publishing hit Posted: 30 Jan 2013 12:49 AM PST  James Joyce, author of 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegan's Wake'. – AFP pic The first-ever mainland Chinese edition of the novel sold out its initial print run of 8,000 copies just three weeks after being launched in December, the official Xinhua news agency said. Translator Dai Congrong of Shanghai's Fudan University toiled for eight years to render the work about an Irish family into Chinese, imitating the stream of consciousness style and unusual language, it said. It quoted Wang Weisong of the Shanghai People's Publishing House, which released the book, as saying its success was "totally unexpected". Both the translator and the publisher declined to comment on Tuesday. Chinese readers are already familiar with other works of the early 20th century Irish writer. The Chinese edition of "Ulysses", considered his masterpiece, went on sale in 1995. Literary critic Liu Wei told a recent seminar on "Finnegans Wake" that the book – the plot of which remains open to interpretation – deserved respect. "Modern writers share a common sense of doing interesting textual experiments... among this group of writers, Joyce has the most intensive sense of all," he said, according to an online transcript. "I think it deserves our respect that Joyce created such a rich text." But one reader, who gave the name Eudaimonus, said in a microblog posting that the work was not accessible to all. "Finnegans Wake is a book for book collectors and critics, but not for readers," the posting said. Others were more emphatic. Xinhua quoted Jiang Xiaoyuan, a professor at Shanghai's Jiaotong University, as saying: "Joyce must have been mentally ill to create such a novel." – AFP/Relaxnews |
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