John Burdett, a British crime novelist who has spent a major part of his life in Thailand, is that rare writer who blends fully into an adopted culture For a sizeable chunk of my adult life I have lived in South East Asia, shuttling between Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. One balmy day in late summer, […]
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Earlier this month when the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm announced that there would be two prizes of literature announced this year, the surprise was not really that two fine writers could look forward to the honour, one for 2019 and the other for 2018. The sense of disbelief was that the prize was going to […]
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Candidates for the new era name apparently include at least one inspired by classical Japanese literature, according to informed sources. In line with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wishes, one or more potential era names appear to be based on books written in Japan, the sources said. All of Japan’s past and current era names are […]
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Matt Salinger confirmed reports that the author of The Catcher In The Rye continued to write decades after he stopped publishing books. The son of US writer JD Salinger has revealed that previously unseen work by his late father will be published. In comments to The Guardian, Matt Salinger confirmed reports that the author of […]
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An asylum seeker and journalist detained for years by Australia on an island in the Pacific has been awarded the country’s richest literary prize. Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian Kurd, wrote No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by text message from inside a detention centre. It won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature, […]
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Hours after she was announced as one of the recipients of the Padma Shri on Friday evening, author-publisher Gita Mehta declared she was declining the award as the “timing would be misconstrued”. Gita Mehta is the sister of Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. Mehta was given the Padma Shri for her contributions to the field […]
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A Chinese writer has been given a 10 year sentence for writing and selling a novel which featured gay sex scenes. The writer, identified as Liu, was jailed by a court in Anhui province last month for producing and selling “obscene material”. Her novel, titled “Occupation”, featured “male homosexual behaviour… including perverted sexual acts like […]
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Catherine Camus reveals how his death in 1960 left a wound that has never healed It was the news that ushered in the Sixties with a violent bang. After lunch on Jan 4 1960, the car in which Albert Camus was travelling, driven by his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard, skidded off a road near […]
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Ismail Fahd Ismail’s Al-Sabiliat explores the reason behind the existence of a green artery in the midst of a vast wasteland in Iraq In the final interview he gave before his death in September, the author talks about his birthplace Al Sabiliat which inspired his prize-winning novel of the same name “My ambition was to […]
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“Milkman” by writer Anna Burns scooped the 2018 Man Booker Prize on Tuesday, with the Northern Irish writer winning the literary award for her third full-length novel. Set in an unnamed city during the bloody “Troubles” of Northern Ireland, the “Milkman” tells the coming-of-age story of a young girl’s affair with an older man. As […]
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