Word: bookers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night with his novel, The White Tiger, joining a pantheon of past Booker winners that includes such literary giants as V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and Salman Rushdie. It was a remarkable victory for Adiga, a 33-year-old first-time novelist who spent part of his youth in the Indian city of Mangalore and now lives in Bombay. As an old friend of his, I was sitting at the table with Adiga in London's Guildhall when he won, surrounded by people from his U.K. publishing house...
...Booker judges certainly felt so. Michael Portillo, who chaired the panel of judges and presented Adiga with a check for 50,000 pounds ($87,283) in prize money, told me that part of what thrilled him about The White Tiger is that it's as disturbing as it is entertaining. "This book changed me," Portillo said. "It changed my view of certain things, like what is the real India and what is the nature of poverty." Another of the judges, who asked not to be named, confided that it was "a very tricky choice" between Adiga's book...
...love words, I love languages," says Amitav Ghosh, the award-winning Indian novelist. "It's only when you know many languages that you realize there are few boundaries between them." His latest book, Sea of Poppies - recently short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize - crests along the collision and collusion of tongues found aboard the Ibis, a 19th century schooner plying the Indian Ocean. Its crew speaks a babble of English, Portuguese, Hindustani, Malay, Tamil, Chinese - and yet, through "the alchemy of the open water," as Ghosh writes, they communicate sufficiently well to sail this great wooden hulk...
...Longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize (and a strong candidate for the shortlist to be announced on Sept. 9), The Lost Dog tells the stories of two people, Tom Loxley and Nelly Zhang. Tom, a divorced Anglo-Indian literary scholar who lives in Melbourne, has lost his dog in the vast wilderness of the Australian bush. He is there staying in the holiday home of his friend, Nelly, while he finishes a book on Henry James and the uncanny. Nelly, an artist who lives and works in a disused Victorian textile mill called the Preserve, located...
Left on the altar of the anodyne was a much more interesting convention that might have been. Some truly invigorating change was bubbling just below the surface of this gathering. Young, black Democrats like Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, and Adrian Fenty, mayor of Washington, D.C., talked openly about the straitjacketing effect of special interests on the Democratic party - especially the teachers unions, with their resistance to education reform. It is an opinion that Barack Obama shares, or at least used to share. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, he expressed his frustration at the educational establishment, calling...