Announcing the shortlist for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2009, Louise Doughty, Chair of the judging panel said:
'We're very pleased to have chosen such a strong and diverse list for this year's John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Although the books were judged solely on quality, four different genres are represented by writers living across the globe - it's a truly international selection with authors from Nigeria, India, Canada, the UK and Australia. We have one collection of poetry, two works of non-fiction, one short story collection and two novels, one of which is arguably a 'hybrid' book. As such, this list is a fascinating display of the range and strength of contemporary writing by young writers. It will be very hard to choose just one book from it and the prize is wide open.'
Viv Bird, Chief Executive of Booktrust commented:
‘The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, run by Booktrust, recognises and celebrates the very best young writers in the early stage of their careers. I have no doubt that readers will enjoy the rich mix of books nominated in this year’s shortlist’
The shortlist
Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic Press)
In this compelling new work of fiction, Aravind Adiga has imagined the small Indian city of Kittur, an everytown nestling on the south coast of Goa and north of Calicut. Through the myriad and distinctive voices of its inhabitants, an entire Indian world comes vividly and unforgettably to life.
From a middle-aged Communist to an Islamic terrorist; from the young children of a Tamil building-site worker to a privileged and alienated schoolboy; from an idealistic journalist to a Brahmin housemaid, Between the Assassinations presents a compelling microcosm of Indian life in the 80s, the years between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. Muslim, Christian and Hindu, high-caste and low-caste, rich and poor: all of life – the ‘sorrowful parade of humanity’ – is here.
Journeying through Kittur’s streets and schoolyards, bedrooms and businesses, its inner workings and outer limits, Adiga conjures a remarkable fictional landscape. Sizzling with acid observations and textured with wicked humour and gentle humanity, Between the Assassinations is a triumph of voice and imagination.
The Striped World by Emma Jones (Faber)
With a tidal imagination, the poems in this debut collection sweep between old worlds and new, seeking the lost and recovering the found among shipwrecks, underwater zoos and transitory lands. Emma Jones brings her inventive worlds dramatically to life in a series of vividly distilled meetings: of settlers and indigenous peoples, of seawaters and shore, of humanity and the wilds of nature. Here tigers stalk the captive and the free, while Daphne tells of her new leaves, ‘They sing, and make the world.’ The same might be said of the poems themselves in this restless memorable search for belonging. The Striped World marks Emma Jones as a new voice worth following.
Six Months in Sudan by James Maskalyk (Canongate)
An outstanding account of saving lives in one of the most dangerous and desperate places on earth.
James Maskalyk set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan in 2007 as Médecins sans Frontières’ newest medical doctor in the field. Equipped with his experience as an emergency physician in a Western hospital and his desire to understand the hardest parts of the world, Maskalyk’s days were spent treating malnourished children, fending off a measles epidemic and staying out of the soldiers’ way. Worn raw in the struggle to meet overwhelming needs with inadequate resources, he returned home six months later more affected by the experience, the people and the place than he had anticipated.
Six Months in Sudan began as a blog that he wrote from his hut in Sudan in an attempt to bring his family and friends closer to his hot, hot days. It is a story about humans: the people of Abyei who suffer its hardship because it is their home, and the doctors, nurses and countless volunteers who leave their homes with the tools to make another’s easier to endure. With great hope and insight, Maskalyk illuminates a distant place – its heat, its people, its poverty, its war – to inspire possibilities for action.
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate)
From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Orange Prize-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, come 12 dazzling stories in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West.
In ‘A Private Experience’, a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she’s been pushing away. In ‘Tomorrow is Too Far’, a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother’s death. The young mother at the centre of ‘Imitation’ finds her comfortable life threatened when she learns that her husband back in Lagos has moved his mistress into their home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them.
Searing and powerful, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s prodigious storytelling powers.
Waste by Tristram Stuart (Allen Lane)
With shortages, volatile prices and nearly one billion people hungry, the world has a food problem – or thinks it does.
Farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers in North America and Europe discard up to half of their food – enough to feed all the world’s hungry at least three times over. Forests are destroyed and nearly one tenth of the West’s greenhouse gas emissions are released growing food that will never be eaten. While affluent nations throw away food through neglect, in the developing world crops rot because farmers lack the means to process, store and transport them to market.
But there could be surprisingly painless remedies for what has become one of the world’s most pressing environmental and social problems. Travelling from Yorkshire to China, from Pakistan to Japan, and introducing us to foraging pigs, potato farmers, freegans and food industry directors, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of profligacy, but also inspiring innovations and ways of making the most of what we have.
Combining frontline investigation with startling new data, Waste shows how the way we live now has created a global food crisis – and what we can do to fix it.
After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)
Following the breakdown of a turbulent relationship, Frank moves from Canberra to a shack on the east coast once owned by his grandparents. He wants to put his violent past and bad memories of his father behind him. In this small coastal community, he tried to reinvent himself as someone capable of regular conversation and cordial relations. He even starts to make friends, including a precocious eight-year-old named Sal. But it is not that easy for him to let go of the past.
Leon is the child of European immigrants living in Sydney. His father loves Australia for becoming their home when their own country turned hostile during the Second World War, but his mother is not so comforted by suburban life in a cake shop. As Leon grows up in the 50s and 60s, he watches as his parents’ lives are broken after his father volunteers to fight in the Korean War. Leon himself goes from working in the shop, sculpting sugar dolls for the tops of wedding cakes, to killing young men as a conscripted machine-gunner in Vietnam.
In the fall-out from the war, Leon thinks he might be able to make a new life with his woman, make a baby, live by the sea in a small shack. But something watches from the cold shade of the teeming bush.
Set in eastern Australia with its dark trees and blinding light, where the land is old but its wonders are still wet, this beautifully realised debut tells a story of fathers and sons, their wars and the things they will never know about each other. It is about the things men cannot say out loud and the taut silence that fills up the empty space.
About the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
The prize was founded 66 years ago in honour of the writer John Llewellyn Rhys, who was killed in action in World War II. His young wife, also a writer, began the award to honour and celebrate his life. Past winners of the award include VS Naipaul, Dan Jacobson, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, David Hare, AL Kennedy, Andrew Motion, William Boyd, AN Wilson and Charlotte Mendelson.
Last year’s winner was Henry Hitchings for his book The Secret Life of Words.
