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2013 Man Booker Prize
The 2013 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 15 October 2013 to Eleanor Catton for her novel ''The Luminaries''. A longlist of thirteen titles was announced on 23 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 10 September. The jury was chaired by Robert Macfarlane, who was joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Natalie Haynes, Martha Kearney, and Stuart Kelly. The shortlist contained great geographical and ethnic diversity, with Zimbabwean-born NoViolet Bulawayo, Eleanor Catton of New Zealand, Jim Crace from England, Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri, Canadian-American Ruth Ozeki and Colm Tóibín of Ireland. Judging panel On 21 November 2012, it was announced that Robert Macfarlane would chair the panel of judges that would decide the winner of the 2013 award. Macfarlane declared that he felt "very proud indeed to be chairing this prize, which has done so much to shape the modern literary landscape." On 17 December, he was joined by four other judges: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Man Booker Prize
The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives international publicity which usually leads to a sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African (and later Zimbabwean) citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014 it was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial. A five-person panel constituted by authors, librarians, literary agents, publishers, and booksellers is appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation each year to choose the winning book. A high-profile literary award in British culture, the Booker Prize is greeted with anticipation and fanfare. Literary critics have noted that it is a mark of distinction for authors to be selected for inclusion i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
We Need New Names
''We Need New Names'' is the 2013 debut novel of expatriate Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo. A coming-of-age story, ''We Need New Names'' tells of the life of a young girl named Darling, first as a 10-year-old in Zimbabwe, navigating a world of chaos and degradation with her friends, and later as a teenager in the Midwest United States, where a better future seems about to unfold when she goes to join an aunt working there. The first chapter of the book, "Hitting Budapest", initially presented as a story in the ''Boston Review'', won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.Helon Habila"We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo – review" ''The Guardian'', 20 June 2013. Margaret Busby"We Need New Names, By NoViolet Bulawayo" (review) ''The Independent'', 7 June 2013. when the Chair of Judges, Hisham Matar, said: "The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles. This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Five Star Billionaire
''Five Star Billionaire'' is a novel by Tash Aw, published in 2013. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2013 Man Booker Prize, Aw's first nomination. Content A series of narratives cover the experiences of five Malaysian Chinese expats attempting to settle in Shanghai in pursuit of financial opportunities. Reviews Writing for ''The Guardian'', Aminatta Forna wrote... ''Even where the narrative takes a dramatic turn, it is delivered in Aw's spare, fresh, cool, almost dispassionate prose, which though it succeeds in many ways somehow never quite leaves the page. Instead the characters drift towards their various destinies, caught in the whirlpool of Shanghai. There's more than a hint of fatalism in the air.'' Jan Stuart, writing for ''The Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tash Aw
Tash Aw, whose full name is Aw Ta-Shi (; born 4 October 1971) is a Malaysian writer living in London. Biography Born in 1971 in Taipei, Taiwan, to Malaysian parents, Tash Aw returned to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the age of two, and grew up there. Like many Malaysians, he had a multilingual upbringing, speaking Chinese and Cantonese at home, and Malay and English at school. He eventually relocated to England to study law at Jesus College, Cambridge, and at the University of Warwick before moving to London to write. He completed the MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 2003. His first novel, '' The Harmony Silk Factory'', was published in 2005. It was longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award as well as the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region). It also made it to the long-list of the world's prestigious 2007 International Impac Dublin Award and the Guardian Fir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Viking Press
Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim and then acquired by the Penguin Group in 1975. History Guinzburg, a Harvard graduate and former employee of Simon and Schuster and Oppenheimer, a graduate of Williams College and Alfred A. Knopf, founded Viking in 1925 with the goal of publishing nonfiction and "distinguished fiction with some claim to permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest." B. W. Huebsch joined the firm shortly afterward. Harold Guinzburg's son Thomas became president in 1961. The firm's name and logo—a Viking ship drawn by Rockwell Kent—were meant to evoke the ideas of adventure, exploration, and enterprise implied by the word "Viking." In August 1961, they acquired H.B. Huesbsch, which maintained a list of backlist titles from authors such as James Jo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Testament Of Mary
''The Testament of Mary'' is a short novel by Irish writer Colm Tóibín. The book was published on 13 November 2012 by Scribner's. The novel is written from the point of view of Mary, mother of Jesus, reflecting in her old age on her son's life and the claims he was a messiah. Plot At an unspecified age, when Mary is close to death, she is regularly visited by followers of her son who wish to record her testament before she dies. However they are antagonistic towards Mary because they believe her son, Jesus, was a Messiah, a claim which she refuses to support. Mary reflects that, like many young men, her son left their small town for opportunities in Jerusalem. Marcus, a cousin of hers, later visited her to reveal that her son was being closely watched by Roman and Jewish authorities after appearing to cure a man who could no longer walk; the cousin urged Mary to have Jesus return to live with her to save his life and not draw further ire. In order to speak to Jesus, Mary tra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canongate
The Canongate is a street and associated district in central Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland. The street forms the main eastern length of the Royal Mile while the district is the main eastern section of Edinburgh's Old Town. It began when David I of Scotland, by the Great Charter of Holyrood Abbey c.1143, authorised the Abbey to found a burgh separate from Edinburgh between the Abbey and Edinburgh. The burgh of Canongate that developed was controlled by the Abbey until the Scottish Reformation when it came under secular control. In 1636 the adjacent city of Edinburgh bought the feudal superiority of the Canongate but it remained a semi-autonomous burgh under its own administration of bailies chosen by Edinburgh magistrates, until its formal incorporation into the city in 1856. The burgh gained its name from the route that the canons of Holyrood Abbey took to Edinburgh—the canons' way or the canons' gait, from the Scots word ''gait'' meaning "way". In more modern tim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Tale For The Time Being
''A Tale for the Time Being'' is a metafictional novel by Ruth Ozeki narrated by two characters, a sixteen-year-old Japanese American girl living in Tokyo who keeps a diary, and a Japanese American writer living on an island off the coast of British Columbia who finds the diary of the young woman washed ashore some time after the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan. Overview Nao, a second-generation Japanese American and native California girl, experiences the pain and discomfort of being uprooted from her home in Silicon Valley after her father loses his job, prompting her family to move back to Tokyo. Nao identifies as an American and feels like "an ordinary California girl adopted by Japanese parents", though she feels alienated in her new environment and finds it difficult to relate to the Japanese part of her identity. Part of this discomfort derives from the fact that – unlike her parents, who identify as Japanese and speak the language fluently – she only speaks conversa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bloomsbury Publishing
Bloomsbury Publishing plc is a British worldwide publishing house of fiction and non-fiction. It is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index. Bloomsbury's head office is located in Bloomsbury, an area of the London Borough of Camden. It has a US publishing office located in New York City, an India publishing office in New Delhi, an Australia sales office in Sydney CBD and other publishing offices in the UK including in Oxford. The company's growth over the past two decades is primarily attributable to the '' Harry Potter'' series by J. K. Rowling and, from 2008, to the development of its academic and professional publishing division. The Bloomsbury Academic & Professional division won the Bookseller Industry Award for Academic, Educational & Professional Publisher of the Year in both 2013 and 2014. Divisions Bloomsbury Publishing group has two separate publishing divisions—the Consumer division and the Non-Consumer division—supported by group functions, namely Sales an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Lowland
''The Lowland'' is the second novel by American author Jhumpa Lahiri, published by Alfred A. Knopf and Random House in 2013. The book received praise from critics and was commercially successful. On October 13, 2013, ''The Lowland'' reached #5 of the ''New York Times'' Best-sellers list of combined print and ebooks. The book also was at #3 on the hardcover list. Plot Part I Raised in Tollygunge in Calcutta, brothers Subhash and Udayan are inseparable; they find joy in fixing and listening to radios, learning Morse Code, and looking out for each other at school. When they leave home for university studies, their ideologies are challenged; Udayan embraces the Naxalite Movement while Subhash is more interested in further education in preparation for his career and leaves for graduate studies in Rhode Island. Subhash learns that despite the massive bloodshed as a result of the Naxalite Movement, all attention from the press is focused on the Vietnam War; this becomes crystal clear ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Picador
A ''picador'' (; pl. ''picadores'') is one of the pair of horse-mounted bullfighters in a Spanish-style bullfight that jab the bull with a lance. They perform in the ''tercio de varas'', which is the first of the three stages in a stylized bullfight. Function The ''picador'' has three main functions in a traditional bullfight: * To pierce the muscle on the back of the bull’s neck in order to straighten the bull's charge. * To fatigue the bull’s neck muscles and general stamina as it tries to lift the horse with its head. * To lower the bull’s head in preparation for the next stage. If the public feels that a picador is better than the bull the public will whistle, boo or jeer as they see fit. This is because they do not want the bull to lose all its strength and energy as this can lead to a dull bullfight. The picador is obliged to give the bull two lances in a first category bullring (Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla, Zaragoza etc.), but the matador may request that the se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
