Search results
Rohinton Mistry is the only author whose every novel has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002) are all set in India's Parsee community. Recognised as one of the most important contemporary writers of postcolonial literature, Mistry's subtle yet powerful narratives engross general readers, excite critical acclaim and form staple elements of literature courses across the world. This study provides an insight into the key features of Mistry's work. It suggests how the author's writing can be read in terms of recent Indian political history, his native Zoroastrian culture and ethos, and the experience of migration, which now sees him living in Canada. The texts are viewed through the lens of diaspora and minority discourse theories to show how Mistry's writing is illustrative of marginal positions in relation to sanctioned national identities. In addition, Mistry utilises and blends the conventions of oral storytelling common to the Persian and South Asian traditions, with nods in the direction of the canonical figures of modern European literature, sometimes reworking and reinflecting their registers and preoccupations to create a distinctive voice redolent of the hybrid inheritance of Parsee culture and of the postcolonial predicament more generally.
5 Anne Enright: taking the Green Road 164 Five Irish Women Anne Enright, one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, the first Irish female winner of the Man Booker prize (in 2007) for her novel The Gathering, and from 2015 to 2018 the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction sponsored by the Arts Council, cannot be usefully addressed or described as a confessional artist in the style of Edna O’Brien or Sinéad O’Connor. However, she has discussed aspects of her own life in interviews, reviews and essays, including numerous contributions to the Guardian, the Diary
This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.
boundary crossing. 5 The winning of the 2015 Man Booker Prize by James for this novel might suggest canonisation, but if so, what canon? James’s achievement transcends the boundary of Caribbean writing. The fact that it has been taken up by HBO to be made into a TV series arguably suggests its contiguity with other popular forms. Among his influences James cites William Faulkner, Roberto Bolano and comic
interface between Jewishness and “Englishness” in his work’ ( Gilbert 2013 : 9). In their introduction to a special edition of European Judaism on contemporary British Jewish writing, the editors, Axel Stähler and Sue Vice, recognise ‘a dazzling burst in the productivity of British Jewish literature’, ‘characterized by a new confidence’ ( Stähler and Vice 2014 : 3) and endorsed by a series of prestigious literary awards, most notably the Nobel Prize for Harold Pinter, the Orange Prize for Naomi Alderman and Linda Grant and of course Jacobson’s own Man Booker Prize
a hilariously comic provocateur; a passionate polemicist and an ardent advocate of ‘ambiguity and contradiction’ ( Jacobson 2012a : xiii); the author of (in his own words) ‘the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere’ ( Buckley 2006 : 23), whose literary heroes are Jane Austen and D.H. Lawrence, Jacobson revels in ambivalence. These protean qualities are reflected in the range and diversity of his work. Best known for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Finkler Question (2010), Jacobson is, at the time of writing, the author of
Children’s Book . Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the same year (Byatt was eventually beaten to the coveted prize by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall , which tells the story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to prominence at Henry VIII’s court), The Children’s Book is set in a historical period previously uncharted by Byatt. The novel explores the fin-de-siècle world of a large cast of
draft Morgan assumes that his philosophy professor friend has scintillating, ‘smart bearded friends’ and is in line for ‘the Man Booker Prize’, a Freudian slip erased from the final script. Male envy and competitiveness insistently surface in the story. Yet male anxieties – ideas of masculinity bound up with an ideal of performance – are projected on to the female character. Throughout the film the exhortations to maleness – of wanting men to be men – are voiced through Meg. She likens her husband devastatingly to the ‘postman who never knocks
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for the first time, for his novel Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969); since then he has been shortlisted for The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Reading Turgenev (1991) and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002); he was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Love and Summer (2009). In addition, Trevor has won numerous awards and prizes, including the O. Henry Award for short fiction (five times), the Whitbread Book of the Year Award (three times), the Irish PEN Award and the David Cohen Literature Prize. In 2002 he was knighted for
Summer was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and received Love and Summer201 glowing reviews worldwide. But although writers and critics agree on the literary quality of the work, there is considerable disagreement regarding its principal concerns. Sebastian Barry concludes that the novel is a celebration of freedom, whereas Melissa Katsoulis sees it as a meditation on the ‘impossibility of escape’.7 Susan Hill links the novel to Edna O’Brien’s declaration that the only topics for Irish writers are ‘Love and Death’ and the effects of these life-changing events on