NO SHORTAGE OF STORIES FOR THIS BOOKER PRIZE WINNER

Canberra Times
March 29, 2006 Wednesday

Booker Prize-winning author DBC Pierre says he really likes Australia
now he doesn’t have to appear in court.

That’s a joke, although the Australian- born 44-year-old did face court
in Adelaide for his dad’s corn husks, found by customs officials in
boxes the grieving 20-year-old had packed – “with a desperate hangover”
– and sent from the family home in Mexico after his agricultural
scientist father died.

And so Pierre was charged and convicted in the “beautiful old court
building” by the “nice affable guys” who, he readily points out,
were just doing their job. There is no shortage of stories when it
comes to DBC Pierre, in Canberra last night to give a reading from
his second novel, Ludmila’s Broken English, at Tilley’s in Lyneham.

Set in an area of the world he had never visited before, near the
dangerous border region of the former Soviet republics of Armenia
and Azerbaijan, the novel has been described as the unlikely meeting
between East and West that follows Ludmila Derev’s appearance on
a Russian brides website. Seen as a swipe at globalisation, it
examines human atrocities in the Caucasus and is what he calls an
“honest portrayal of the chaos and disorder that passes for daily
life in that part of the world”.

Born Peter Finlay in Reynella, South Australia, Pierre left for Mexico
with his family at the age of six. Waywardness and adventures followed,
until his spectacular debut on the literary stage at age 41 when his
first novel, Vernon God Little, won the 2003 Man Booker Prize.

Before it won, it was published in 38 countries – but its blistering
assault on the superpower that gave the world the Big Mac, The
Jerry Springer Show and the high-school massacre raised such ire in
America that nobody would publish it there. And it didn’t help that
the manuscript for Vernon literally arrived on American publishers’
desks the day after September 11.

Hot on the heels of the Booker came the news that Pierre owed money
to several people, including some angry people in Texas, which, by
his own cheerful admission, he had let slip through his fingers in
a happy-go-round of drugs, the odd libation, and big ideas.

Stories such as these surround DBC Pierre, and he retold them last
night in a rich voice, with his sense of humour constantly rattling
sabres.

Astute and smart, he doesn’t take himself seriously either. But there
is no mistaking his commitment to his art, and Ludmila’s Broken English
(Faber) will no doubt be very closely scrutinised.

As for the name, it comes from his teenage nickname “Dirty Pierre”
and, after a chequered, varied career, including as a cartoonist,
he came up with “Dirty But Clean”.

He abbreviated that, and took the literary world by storm.