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First-time author wins
richest British literary prize
Associated Press
LONDON — The Australian
author of the book Stasiland: Stories From Behind the
Berlin Wall has won Britain's richest literary prize
for nonfiction.
Anna Funder was awarded the $59,000 2004 Samuel Johnson
Prize for Nonfiction this week. It is the former lawyer
and TV producer's first book.
In awarding the prize, the judges said that Funder
unearths "extraordinary tales from the underbelly" of
the former East Germany. The prize is sponsored by the
British Broadcasting Corp.
Funder defeated American author Bill Bryson for his best
seller A Short History of Nearly Everything and
Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A
History of the Soviet State. Both had been
short-listed for the prize, which celebrates originality
and diversity in contemporary nonfiction publishing.
Funder, who lives in Sydney, visits the man who painted
the line that became the Berlin Wall, meets the woman
accused of potentially sparking a conflict by trying to
cross the border and gets drunk with the "Mik Jegger" of
the East.
The judges said the book contained "wonderful flashes of
humor, despite the sobering subject matter."
"This is an intimate portrait, both touching and funny,
of survivors caught between their desire to forget and
the need to remember."
The other short-list books included:
Aidan Hartley's The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love
and War, Tom Holland for Rubicon: The Triumph and
Tragedy of the Roman Republic and Jonathan Bate's
biography of poet John Clare
Impac
Literary Award Goes to a Moroccan
New York Times
A
Moroccan author, Tahar Ben Jelloun, was named the winner
yesterday of the $120,000 International Impac Dublin
Literary Award, the world's richest prize for a single
work of fiction published in English.
Mr. Ben Jelloun won for his
fact-based novel, "This Blinding Absence of Light" (New
Press, 2002), about a soldier imprisoned in a desert
concentration camp after taking part in an abortive coup
against King Hassan II of Morocco in 1971. The book was
written in French, and Mr. Ben Jelloun will receive
three-fourths of the prize money, with the rest going to
Linda Coverdale, who translated the novel.
Mr. Ben Jelloun, born in Fez in 1944,
has lived since 1961 in France, where he won the Prix
Goncourt in 1987 for his novel "The Sacred Night." The
Impac Dublin Literary Award is financed by Impac, a
Florida-based management company owned by James B. Irwin
Sr., who wanted to note Ireland's contributions to world
literature. It is administered by Dublin City Public
Libraries, and nominations are made by public libraries
around the world.
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