quarta-feira, abril 16, 2008

Writer Amit becomes a Booker judge

Amit Chaudhuri

Writer Amit becomes a Booker judge
AMIT ROY

London, March 18: The next best thing to winning a Booker Prize is to be a Booker judge — today, 46-year-old Indian author Amit Chaudhuri was given that honour.
He is to be a judge not for the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction (for which one of his own novels may qualify one day) but the more recently established Man Booker International Prize.
While the former, worth £52,500, is given to a winning novel that has to be written by a Commonwealth citizen, the latter, worth £60,000, is much more global in character — “any author from any part of the world whose work has been published in English” qualifies — and the prize is given for a whole body of work rather than a single book.
A Man Booker spokesman said in London today that the “eminent” panel for the International Prize 2009 would be chaired by writer Jane Smiley, and includes “academic and musician Amit Chaudhuri, and writer, film scriptwriter, and essayist Andrey Kurkov”.
Chaudhuri, author of such novels as Afternoon Raag and Freedom Song, called the International Prize “a corrective to the commercial fracas of the Booker Prize for Fiction”.
The judges will be paid for their work and it will be money well earned. The judges will draw up a shortlist of 15 authors they consider deserving and will have to meet and fight it out to decide which of their candidates finally emerges triumphant.
“The judges’ list of contenders, approximately 15 writers under serious consideration for the prize, will be announced in New York in early spring 2009,” said the spokesman.
“The winner will be announced in early summer 2009. The winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel; there are no submissions from publishers.”
The International Prize is awarded every two years. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe won the 2007 prize and Albanian writer Ismail Kadare won the inaugural prize in 2005 and went on to gain worldwide recognition.
The idea is to draw attention to great writers who may not have achieved high-profile status.
“We want people to say, ‘Oh, I have not heard of him, must read him,’” the spokesman said.
If the winner has depended on translation, he or she can choose for the translator to be given a separate prize of £15,000. This is an especially important aspect of the publishing business in India where many regional authors feel they are marginalised because their work is not available in translation.
On behalf of Man Booker, Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of the prize, commented: “Each of our three judges for the Man Booker International Prize 2009 is expert on a vastly different area of world literature. Knowledgeable as writers as well as readers, they will together bring a high degree of excellence, enthusiasm and experience to the task ahead.”
Chaudhuri told The Telegraph he was inclined to include candidates he personally admired, both from India — the Tamil writer Ashokamitran (Jagadisa Thyagarajan) and Mahasweta Devi, for example — and also from abroad, including Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešic, J.M. Coetzee, Richard Ford and Philip Roth.
“I am glad that Booker is doing something serious,” he said. “This is turning out to be a far more important prize than the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.”

FONTE (photo include): http://www.telegraphindia.com/

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