Tag: Booker Prize
-
Bastardising epic: Shehean Karunatilaka’s ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’
Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books, 2022) won last year’s Booker Prize for its ‘energy, imagery and ideas [set] against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars’. We find that ‘surreal vision’ in its depiction of the afterlife—both the In Between (a version of purgatory), and the…
-
Anne Enright’s ‘Actress’ (part 1): finding a mother
In this and my next blog (also on Actress), I’m going to focus on intertextuality. Intertextuality was described by Julia Kristeva as a mosaic of interaction between texts.[1] For Kristeva, this quite commonly takes the form of deliberate and explicit intertextual references—quotations, narrative nods, character types and names—but I am most interested in intertextuality that…
-
Writing (a) genealogy: ‘Surge’ by Jay Bernard
In ‘Kombucha’, a prose poem about, among other things, menstrual mooncups, Jay Bernard’s persona asks: When I stare at these bottles, it’s blood that has been three times enlarged. Who says we have no genealogy? Who says that if I line them up, as ornaments, a blood archive, then it isn’t like us having had…
-
A stretched tapestry: Bernardino Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’
Twelve overlapping stories across over 450 pages. A novel ‘bursting at the seams’ (Guardian). A book without a single full-stop. Bernardino Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other invites scrutiny about its structure and how it stitches together the twelve narrative patches of the quilt. Or is it: … how it constructs the twelve-piece mosaic? I think…
-
Whose fault is it anyway? Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Testaments’
No doubt editors are as old as authors. For Shakespeare, there were not only his fellow actors, but also the Master of the Revels to regulate, edit, and to censor his plays. T.S. Eliot made abundant and explicit use of Ezra Pound’s incisive cutting for ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), calling him ‘il miglio fabbro’ (‘the…
-
Booker Prize Longlist, 2019
Backing the favourites The eagerly-awaited Booker Prize longlist was announced on Wednesday this week. The £50,000 Prize is well sought-after, and winning it has cemented the careers of many writers. In the eyes of many, to be known as the ‘Booker Prize-winning author’ is only beaten by ‘Nobel Prize-winning author’ title. Big bucks; big stakes.…