CONTROVERSIAL WRITER UP FOR PRIZE
BBC NEWS
inment/7302362.stm
2008/03/18 10:57:23 GMT
Author Elif Shafak, who was prosecuted for "insulting Turkishness"
in her book The Bastard Of Istanbul has been longlisted for the Orange
book prize.
She faced charges for comments made by her characters on the mass
killings of Armenians in the final years of the Ottoman Empire in
the 20th Century.
A court in Istanbul eventually acquitted the novelist.
Turkish-born Shafak is one of 20 writers who have been longlisted
for the British prize for women’s writing.
Seven debut novelists have also been included on the list along with
veteran writers like Deborah Moggach, who is longlisted for her 16th
novel, In The Dark.
Anne Enright’s The Gathering, which won the Man Booker prize 2007,
has also been featured.
There’s no such thing as male writing, any more then there’s such a
thing as women’s writing. There’s just good writing and band writing
Tim Lott, writer
Linda Grant, who won the Orange prize in 2002 with When I Lived In
Modern Times, is nominated again for her latest book, The Clothes On
Their Backs.
The prize is open to any woman writing in English, whatever her
nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter.
However, writer Tim Lott told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he thought
the prize was wrong and introducing a male-only book prize for fiction
was not the solution.
"I think it would invite massive derision and I would join in with
that derision. I think the idea that there should be a prize for male
writing is something I wouldn’t want my writing to go into," he said.
"There’s no such thing as male writing, any more then there’s such a
thing as women’s writing. There’s just good writing and band writing."
The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 4 June.
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
