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| Man Asian literary prize goes to Chinese bestseller Su Tong's political fable The Boat to Redemption takes $10,000 awardThe story of a playboy Communist party official who castrates himself after he is banished to live on a river barge has won celebrated Chinese author Su Tong the Man Asian literary prize.Su, by far the best known of the five shortlisted authors, is the second Chinese writer to win the three-year-old prize, which is worth $10,000 (£6,000). Judges, including the authors Colm TóibÃn and Pankaj Mishra, said in a joint statement that his winning title, The Boat to Redemption, was "a picaresque novel of immense charm"."It is also a political fable with an edge which is both comic and tragic, and a parable about the journeys we take in our lives, the distance between the boat of our desires and the dry land of our achievement," they said in a statement. Set during the Cultural Revolution, the novel tells the story of a womanising official who tries to rebuild his life on a boat with his young son after his lineage as the son of a revolutionary mother is questioned. "I'm not sure if The Boat to Redemption can help overseas readers know more about China. It's just a novel centering on the fate of people caught in an absurd time," Su told China Daily."A nation must have the courage to face its own history, whether it's glorious or shameful, beautiful or grey. Misunderstandings often come from hiding and evasion. After all, a novel does not stand for the truth of history, so I'm not afraid of misunderstanding."He beat a strong contingent of writers from the Indian subcontinent to take the prize, including the Indian writers Omair Ahmad and Siddharth Chowdhury and the Kashmiri Indian Nitasha Kaul. Filipino writer Eric Gamalinda was also shortlisted.The Man Asian award goes to an "Asian" novel unpublished in English, with the intention of bringing "exciting new Asian authors to the attention of the world literary community". Its definition of Asian excludes countries such as Iran, Turkey and all the central Asian Stans.Su, 46, is a bestselling author in China and is hardly unknown overseas. He gained an international readership when his novella Wives and Concubines was filmed as the Oscar-nominated and Bafta-winning Raise the Red Lantern in 1991. The author of six novels including Rice (2004) and My Life as Emperor (2006), The Boat to Redemption is already lined up for publication in the UK in January next year, translated by Howard Goldblatt, who also translated 2007's winner of the Man Asian prize, Chinese writer Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem. That novel is currently being adapted for the screen by French director Jean-Jacques Annaud.Last year's prize was won by Filipino writer Miguel Syjuco's novel Ilustrado.Man Asian literary prizeAwards and prizesFictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The digested classic: Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh Vintage, £7.99Sick Boy wis tremblin. Ah wis tryin no tae notis the cunt. He wis bringin me doon.- Rents. Ah goat tae score.             - Aw, ah sais. Ah wanted the radge to fuck off soas ah cid watch ma Jean-Claude Van Damme vidjo.             \-  Youse a cunt, he snaps, bustin me mooth wiz a hammer.             We tae the bus roond to Swanny's. He's holdin n awl so we coak up wiv Raymie.             - Youse goat ta use ma werks, he sais.              - Ah wannae tell the radge to fuck off, that he can shove his Aids urp his erse, but I need the skag. The shite ODs soas ahm erff the hook. Alison sais ah should visit Kelly whos had an abortion. Ah cannae be ersed.             Ahve goat masen a flat an ahm gonnae come off the skaggie this taime. Ah mean it. But first ah needs some stuff tae take the edge off the turkis. Know what ah mean? Ah scores sum opium an sherves it oop ma erse. Ah canna feel a mighty shite comin on. Ma kecks are soaked with diarrhea an the toilet is trashed. Thens ah remember tha droogs. Ah scoop through tha shite till ah fins it an stuff it bak up me erse and lick ma fingers.Junk Dilemmas No 63: Thrillin the poncy London literati wi scuzzy Edinburgh smackheids doant disguise the fact this is jez sum vaguely connected shert storis. - Is sum cunt moanin thers no real structure? sais Begbie. Jaysis, whass the radge expect erf a bunch of junkis? Ahl fuckin beat the shite of the erse. Lets fuck im over, Sick Boy.              Ah sais nuthin. He is a cunt, but hes a mate n aw. Anyways, ahd raither be shagging sum burd.             Ahm sittin in me room trying tae find a vein in ma cock. Iss nae tha big a best o taimes, but noo is drippin blood an covered wi ulcers. Tommy cames in.              - Ah needs sum junk, he sais.              - Yer nae do drugs, I ansas.              - Ah dae noo.Oh my God, where am I? Who are you, more like? I'm Dave, I've appeared from nowhere, but I rather thought you'd like to know I can also mix things up with standard English. I remember picking up Gail in the pub but I don't remember whether I shagged her when she took me home. I hope not, because I've shat, pissed and thrown up in her bed.- Ah had a wee accident, I say to her mum handing her the sheets. The shite dribbles on the floor and she slips over, breaking her leg. Seems like a good moment to leave.             Junk Dilemmas No 69: Canna yers get awa wi jes thinkin up gross shite an writin it doon? Check the fuckin sales figgers, sais Irvine. The thing aboot nihilism is thas nae fuckin point tae anythin. Sers yer canna dae wha ye laike.             Wah yer doin, Franco? Ma burd ersks. Ah tell the cunt ter main her ern biznis an heid ter the station wi Rents. So were on the train an Rents sais, I canna remember what we goan tae London. Have na clue masen. Sum crime or otha.Renton had been clean a while and wasn't at all sure why this chapter was in the third person. But then his tiny cock was as hard as rock so he wasn't that bothered.             - S na verra big an iz covered wiv scabs but ahll shag thas any wa, sais Dianne.              As she wiped the spunk from her cunt, he noticed she was only about 12 year old. Ah best fuck off, he thinks. Can you get us sum blow? she sais. An cum an meet ma parents?Ah shoots a dog wiv mer air rifle and then it bites its oaner an then ah pulps tha boath and the polis thinks ahm a fuckin hero laike Sean Connery. An thas a fuckin pointlis chapta n aw, Sick Boy. Is ma turn agin an Irvine wannae tra tae git a bit deep ba givin me sum back stora, how ma disabled brar deid, how all tha shrinks tra tae mak sense a wha ah became a junky. Fact is ahs a junky cos ahs a addict. End a. Choose life? Why?Junk Dilemmas No 73: If thers oan thin moar depressin than reidin aboot junkies shootin up, rippin oan another off an pishin and shittin is knowin losers laike tha radge Guy Ritchie will be tossin thessen off into their Armani fuckin suits wiv the vicarious excitement an glama.Ahm well fucked na. Couldnae resist bangin up agin an naw mi habits back an mi parents have kidnapped ma. Sweatin, dreamin a dead babies. Jaysis, Irvine's tryin tae hard wiv tha kaind a symbolism. The cunts goat the idea hes naw writin som important fuckin master werk nay jez scribblin down a load a scuzz. Next the cunt will be havin me goan on aboot sectarianism. Spoke tae fuckin soon. Naw mi twat o an elder brar go hisen kilt in Northern Ireland. Ahm ment tae be sad but ah doant giv a fuck. Think ahll jez shag his pregnant burd at the funeral instead.I'm going to save you trying to guess who this is now. It's me Dave, again. I've got Aids now. It should been Rents. I've never shot or fucked a bloke. Just fucked a girl who was raped by some sick radge. Just watch me get my revenge.Tha reminds ma. Ah had a bloke suck ma off once and ah thought ah should tra fuckin Antonio in tha erse. Tha cunt came on ma face befor ah got rained ta it. Ah wis gonnae beat him up but he sais doant kill ma, Rents, ma boyfrien ha kilt hisen.Junk Dilemmas No 78: If yer characters are barely conscious, what state dya reckin ya readers a in ba naw?Ah havnae clue whether ahm off the droogs a na naw. Came tae think a it, ahve lost all trace a time-scale or where ah fuckin is. Jez pass i off as stylish junky chic. Suck on tha Bill Burroughs. An Coupland you can stick Generation X reet up yer erse. Generation X? Choose Generation XXX.I'm glad I dumped Rents and went to university. He was a bright bloke but going nowhere. Money's tight, though, so I'm working as a waitress. I fucking hate some of the clientele who hit on me though. See this lot. I've dunked my tampon in the soup, filled the wine with infected piss. My cystisis is well bad. And I've shat in the chocolate pudding. Cunts don't even notice. Nice.Tha wuz ma ex burd Kelly, ba tha wa. Check out Swanny. His leg bin amputated but he still shoots into tha stump. An thas Tommy. Another poor cunt dyin a Aids. An thas psycho Begbie, beatin the shite outta some radge tha lookt a him tha wrong wa.Junk Dilemmas No 84: How comes it taks 350 pages tae sa tha junkis are lyin, cheatin, scumbags? N whas all tha borin stuff tha maks up 99% o a junkis lif? Ahm well strung oot an ahve had enuff a this shite. Ahm gonnae end it all na. Me an Begbie fucked off tae London wiv a load a smack an flogged it for 16 grand. An ahve ripped Begbie off n aw. So ahm on the train to Amsterdam. An youse can all fuck off. Choose life. Choose an endin. Choose ana endin.Irvine WelshFictionJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A life in children's books: Julia Donaldson 'I've acted the Gruffalo five billion times and I know it completely by heart, but I found the snake and things quite scary'When he was working on the illustrations for Julia Donaldson's The Snail and the Whale, a few years after their hugely successful picture book The Gruffalo, Axel Scheffler had the idea that one of the children on the beach in the story could be drawing a gruffalo in the sand. Since then, Donaldson-Scheffler fans have been able to play a game of spot the gruffalo: in each of their books, somewhere in one of the pictures lurks their distinctive brown monster – disguised as a fish, a Christmas decoration, a cuddly toy. "At the beginning it was quite a naff idea, I thought," Scheffler says, "but I'll have to carry on now because children have started looking for it."The Gruffalo celebrated its 10th birthday this year. On Christmas Day a new 30-minute animation will be screened on BBC1, featuring the voices of Helena Bonham Carter and Tom Wilkinson. More than 4m copies have been sold (Donaldson's total sales have topped 14m), a stage show is in the West End, Gruffalo merchandise is in the shops, and last month Radio 2 listeners voted it the nation's favourite bedtime story, ahead of Winnie-the-Pooh. The book has become a classic.The details of how it came to be are becoming the stuff of publishing legend: how Donaldson had the idea years ago, when she was a jobbing author of educational books, but kept it to herself; how originally the story, derived from a Chinese folk tale, was going to be about a tiger, only tiger wouldn't rhyme; how the 700-word text sat on a publisher's desk for a year before Donaldson, out of frustration, sent it to Scheffler, a German illustrator with whom she had worked years earlier. As for the monster himself, with his terrible teeth and terrible claws, the story goes that she wrote the line "Silly old fox, doesn't he know, there's no such thing as a . . ." before the word "gruffalo" popped into her head. When we flick through the book together in the kitchen of her home in Glasgow, I say how clever it is when the mouse says "Didn't you know, there's no such thing as a Gruffal-" and you turn the page to see the gruffalo for the first time, and the mouse says "OH!". "That was why he was called the Gruffalo," Donaldson explains and then corrects herself. "No, perhaps he was just the Gruffalo to rhyme with 'doesn't he know."Donaldson was 51 when The Gruffalo was published. Since then her work rate has been phenomenal. She has published more than 20 books, about half of them with Scheffler. This year she brought out her first teenage novel, Running on the Cracks, as well as Tabby McTat with Scheffler, What the Ladybird Heard with Lydia Monks and The Troll with David Roberts. At any one time she has several works in progress: currently Scheffler is working on Zog, a dragon story, there's her first book with the award-winning illustrator Emily Gravett, and she is thinking about who might illustrate a sequel she has written to Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat": "At times I've had quite grandiose ideas and approached some very grand illustrators who've very nicely said no."Meanwhile she has a busy sideline in putting on performances of her stories at schools and festivals with assorted family members. On shelves up to the ceiling in her "prop room", off the kitchen, are carefully labelled boxes full of puppets, many of them made by Laura Burr, a craft enthusiast in her publisher's marketing department. She demonstrates the rabbit from The Troll, trip-trapping over the bridge with a Californian accent – "good though he is, his mouth doesn't open quite as wide as it could do" – but says her husband Malcolm gets the best parts: "I'm always the narrator or something, but he moans that he always has to be bad or stupid or both.'As a child, growing up in an arty, leftwing Hampstead household with her parents, younger sister Mary, aunt, uncle and grandmother, she wanted to act. "I think those girlhood ambitions are tied up with a sort of romanticism. I genuinely loved acting and I did have some sort of talent, but after I understudied for the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream when I was about 12, I often used to go to the Old Vic and sit up in the gods and I'd imagine almost flying down on to the stage. It was, I have to admit – not in a really horrible way – this thing of, no one realises, but I am just wonderful."She and her sister were great friends. "I think she sort of hero-worshipped me, and I used to pretend I was – well, I think I believed I was – a fairy in disguise. We had bunk beds and we had this furry dog with a burnt nose called Maflinda, and I would make her do shows, and my father would be playing [string] quartets next door. So I would dangle Maflinda down from the top bunk and she would dance. And then I did this thing of being the witch who never got there and I sort of swung the light and it made this wonderful shadow on the wall and my sister really didn't know how it was done."Donaldson studied drama and French at Bristol university, where she met Malcolm, a medical student. They travelled around Europe, busking, and she began writing down her songs. She sent a tape to the BBC "and that led to a very on and off, up and down sort of career writing songs for children's television". She also wrote two musicals and an operetta telling the story of their romance, which they performed at their wedding reception.Donaldson was 29 when Hamish, the first of three sons, was born. In the 1980s she helped out at the children's school and began writing sketches for her reading group. She kept these "playlets" in a drawer but wasn't confident enough to contact a publisher until, in 1990, Methuen called her with the idea of making one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", into a picture book. She began working for educational publishers, writing "plays and retellings of folk tales and things".Donaldson's would be such a happy story, of talent and hard work and well-deserved riches, were it not for one very great sadness. Her son Hamish grew from an imaginative but complicated child into a disturbed adolescent, finally being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. He suffered episodes of depression and psychosis and, in 2003, took his life, aged 25.She mentions him often, along with his brothers Alastair and Jerry (originally called Jesse, "but that didn't go down well in Scotland" – he became Jerry after Julia's father). But her tears are close to the surface. When she became patron of the charity Artlink Central, which brings artists together with people with special needs, Donaldson spoke publicly about Hamish's illness, but she has grown weary of interviewers raking over painful private details. She says: "I think knowledge of mental health is in its infancy, we're in the stone age, so I can't really say it was this or that." But she believes her son was "born different", with some genetic predisposition to psychiatric illness. "I know some people wouldn't agree with that."She believes that her career taking off as it did probably helped her to survive: "That thing of compartmentalising is very important. Especially if you've got something very difficult going on, the best way of coping is to have some other area of your life that's quite separate."Donaldson's teenage novel Running on the Cracks tackles themes of mental illness. She says: "At the time probably the last thing I would have written was a story about what we were going through. But some of the things coming out now in my writing, maybe just subconsciously – I mean, in a way it's funny that Tiddler and Stick Man and Tabby McTat have all got that theme of someone getting lost and found, and maybe that is a bit about going through it somehow and recovering. Whereas the next one I've done with Axel is called Zog and it's much more lighthearted."She says Tabby McTat is also "very much about handing on to the next generation. I think things do come out that are to do with the stage in life you're at, and what with the children being married and pregnant and things . . ." So she's expecting a grandchild? She sounds delighted: "I am, actually. I wasn't really allowed to say before."Though she is careful not to criticise other writers directly, Donaldson has strong ideas about what children's books should and shouldn't do. She believes she had trouble getting published in the first place because the fashion then was for prose and sentiment. She spent ages trying to write something "modern", before one editor died and another one said "why don't I do something in rhyme, retelling a traditional tale, which was exactly what the other one had said not to do".Although she has stopped looking for direct inspiration from folk tales and fables, their universal and mythic quality is what she aspires to recreate. The point of a story, whether for adults or children, is that it takes you away from your ordinary experience and on an adventure. Above all, it should have a good plot. "I don't like to generalise, because any book of its kind can be good or bad, and I think Guess How Much I Love You is quite a nice book, but around that time there did seem to be lots of books about a father or mother animal and their baby, and they'd be off together in the woods or something, and the baby would say [she puts on a soppy baby voice] 'will you catch me a . . .?' or 'will you still love me even if this or that?''' She answers wearily: "yes", and adds: "There's nothing wrong with that, but I can't help feeling that perhaps those sort of books are much nicer for the parent."Nor does she like "preachy" books that carry too-obvious a moral message: "There seemed to be a lot of books as well, like, 'so-and-so was very shy [puts on a dreary voice], so at school no one wanted to play with her, she had all those problems, blah blah, she tried this, she tried that, she tried the other. Then one day someone said 'try smiling', so so-and-so went to school and gave a big smile and then suddenly everyone smiled back."And you think, well, a) it's not very likely, you know – probably the children will say 'you're all toothy' and it might not have the desired result. And b) it almost seems that those books are there so that if a parent has got a shy child they think 'oh great, I'll get this book, it will help'. That's what I mean by the picture-book medicine: if I read this book three times a day to her then she might go to school and smile and overcome all her own problems. I don't really think books should be like that."One of Donaldson's favourite authors is the American Arnold Lobel. His book Mouse Soup could be viewed as a kind of inspiration for The Gruffalo as it too features a predator outwitted, albeit via different means, by a mouse. "I love, love Arnold Lobel. I wish he was better known here. He is like my god because in those frog and toad books he's so generous, so inventive. He manages to get about five cracking good ideas into one book and they're so funny, and our children would be in hoots of laughter every time Toad said 'blah'. It was too much. They wouldn't go to sleep because they were so full of mirth."Donaldson's own humour is aimed at parents as well as children. But the playful comedy of her gorgeous rhythms and rhymes — "'I like Tiddler's story', said little Johnny Dory,/And he told it to his granny, who told it to a crab" – is interspersed with flashes of real fear. She thinks the gruffalo starts to look "more clown-like, more buffoon-like" as the book progresses, but wonders whether the BBC's animation has gone too far the other way: "I've acted it five billion times and obviously I know it completely by heart, but I found the snake and things quite scary."She objects to politically correct censorship of children's literature: "It's easy to underestimate children, and I think it's much better that they have the whole range . . . It really used to annoy me when Philip Pullman said he hated the Narnia books because it was terrible to have this religious allegory, and I'd be thinking, well hold on, surely that's what's wonderful about books – that you enter into other people's minds and see there's all these different ways of looking at the world?" But she's always trying to come up with new female characters: "'I wanted the gruffalo's child [in the sequel story] to be a girl, and that probably was political correctness in a way, because I had been criticised for the fact that in The Gruffalo they were all male."When Malcolm retires in a few years' time from his post as a paediatrician at Yorkhill children's hospital, they will resume their life as travelling players, maybe moving south, keeping their flat in Edinburgh so they can go back to Scotland for piano lessons. "I think barely a day has gone by in our married life when he hasn't headed for his guitar and played a song. And he's so supportive, not just being nice but genuinely – he gets back from work and he'll be all agog and say 'are there any good emails?' He once said his favourite job if he wasn't a doctor would be a helper in a playgroup."And what of that other partnership, the most successful writer-illustrator collaboration for decades? "I would love to do a book for Axel about bugs because I love his little bugs, but I haven't managed to think of a good storyline." The idea for Stick Man, their book before last, came from Scheffler: he drew the gruffalo's child holding a stick doll. The image rooted in Donaldson's mind, and grew, nourished by memories: "I think most children, or boys anyway, love playing with sticks. Not just fighting, but Hamish in particular used to play with sticks when we were living in France. We didn't have very many toys because we'd gone without, and he just used to play with bits of cardboard and rubbish and say they were ice-creams or violins. It's that idea of an object that can become anything in someone's imagination."Children and teenagersguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Q&A: Joyce Carol Oates 'Super power! I was not aware that I had even an ordinary power'Joyce Carol Oates, 71, was raised in rural New York. She won a scholarship to Syracuse University and published her first novel in 1964. Her book Them won the National Book award, and Blonde was nominated for the Pulitzer prize. A prolific author of fiction, short stories, poetry and plays, Oates this week published two novels, A Fair Maiden and Little Bird Of Heaven.When were you happiest?On two dates: 23 January 1961 and 13 March 2009 (my two weddings).What is your greatest fear?What we all fear – the loss of meaning and significance in our lives.What is your earliest memory? Feverish with measles, I lay in bed helpless, seeing my young, anxious parents hovering over me. I might have been four at the time.What was your most embarrassing moment?This, I fear, is yet to come.What is your most treasured possession? My marriage.What would your super power be? Super power! I was not aware that I had even an ordinary power.What do you most dislike about your appearance? The impression I have always given of being shy, withdrawn.What is your favourite smell? Lilac.What is your favourite word? Nocturne.What is your favourite book? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?A beautiful Fortuny gown.What is your guiltiest pleasure? Staring out the window – wasting time.What do you owe your parents? Everything!What or who is the greatest love of your life? I have had two great loves – my first husband Raymond Smith (who died in February 2008) and my new husband Charles Gross (to whom I was married in March 2009).What does love feel like? Love is an indescribable sensation – perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.What was the best kiss of your life? The most recent.Which words or phrases do you most overuse?If I knew, I would not overuse them!If you could edit your past, what would you change? A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time. For instance, my young husband Raymond and I endured a hellish nine months in Beaumont, Texas when we were first married, but during that time, in a kind of exile from civilisation, I managed to complete much of my first published novel.If you could go back in time, where would you go? To an idyllic day spent with my parents and my grandmother, Blanche Woodside, in the long-ago time when I was a young girl and my parents were living in the country in a place I visit now only in dreams.When did you last cry, and why? Since my husband Raymond died, I cry frequently. Before that, rarely.How often do you have sex? Too private a question!What song would you like played at your funeral? I would not want a song but perhaps a Nocturne of Chopin.What is the most important lesson life has taught you? I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.Rosanna Greenstreetguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Keeping Options Open, Novelist Tows Museum on Road to Dream C. D. Payne has lately been enjoying a second surge of popularity, thanks to the well-received film version of the book “Youth in Revolt.” feeds.nytimes.com |