Για το μυθιστόρημά της «The Road Home» που αφηγείται το ταξίδι ενός ανατολικοευρωπαίου μετανάστη στην Βρετανία Η Τριμέιν κέρδισε το βραβείο που συνοδεύεται από το ποσό των 30.000 στερλινών για την «δυνατή ιστορία που διηγείται με ζεστασιά και χιούμορ», ανακοίνωσε η κριτική επιτροπή των βραβείων αυτών που απονέμονται κάθε χρόνο από το 1996 σε γυναίκα συγγραφέα από όλον τον κόσμο. Η βρετανίδα συγγραφέας διηγείται την ιστορία του Λεβ, ενός εργάτη από κάποια χώρα της ανατολικής Ευρώπης που ξεκινάει για την Βρετανία αναζητώντας μια καλύτερη ζωή για την μητέρα και την κόρη του. «Η επιτροπή πιστεύει πως η Τριμέιν κατάφερε να 'μπει στο μυαλό' ενός ανατολικοευρωπαίου μετανάστη στην σύγχρονη Βρετανία», τόνισε η πρόεδρος της επιτροπης Κίρστι Λανγκ, δημοσιογράφος του BBC.
By Ciar Byrne, Arts and Media Correspondent. The Independent, Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Getty
Rose Tremain celebrates after winning the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for her novel The Road House
The British novelist Rose Tremain has won the £30,000 Orange Prize for women’s fiction for The Road Home, her tale of an immigrant from eastern Europe. The chair of the judges, the broadcaster and journalist Kirsty Lang, said the award was particularly deserved because, despite her long and successful career, Tremain had been "always the bridesmaid, never the bride" when it came to winning top literary prizes.
Accepting her award, Tremain defended the idea of a literary prize for women's fiction against its – mainly male – critics, including the writer Tim Lott. She said: "Come on you guys, stop grumping. This is a prize which celebrates women's fiction. In this year when A L Kennedy has won the Costa, when Anne Enright has won the Booker and when Doris Lessing has won the Nobel, I think there's a lot to celebrate." Talking about her winning novel, Tremain said: "This is a subject which is very much in the air. We think of immigrants as a group, even when tragedies occur such as the Chinese cockle pickers.
"What fiction can do is take an individual and present that individual like us with all his heartbreak and longing and aspirations." Tremain had been the hot favourite to win the award, presented at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Ladbrokes stopped taking bets on her to win on Tuesday after a run of money left her 1/2 favourite.
It is only the second time that the favourite has won the prize, the first being last year when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won withHalf of a Yellow Sun. Explaining why the judges chose Tremain, Lang said: "It was the way she managed to get inside the head of an eastern European migrant coming to England. It's a very warm and empathetic novel." Lang said The Road Home gave an insight into the experience of immigrants in the UK: "This is one of the biggest migrations in the history of this country and yet the average Briton probably knows very little about their lives. It captures the zeitgeist."
She added: "Tremain is one of our greatest contemporary authors and she has been overlooked by the literary establishment, always the bridesmaid, never the bride." Tremain's novel Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 and made into a film, while The Colour was on the shortlist for the Orange Prize in 2004. But she has won a Whitbread Novel of the Year award, a Prix Femina Etranger and a Dylan Thomas Prize. Other novels which were shortlisted included When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson, Fault Lines by Nancy Huston, The Outcast by Sadie Jones, Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill and Lottery by Patricia Wood.
Rose Tremain wins Orange prize for The Road Home
From The Times, June 5, 2008. Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent
Rose Tremain won the Orange Broadband Prize for women's fiction last night with The Road Home, a topical novel about an Eastern European immigrant. Tremain, 64, had been shortlisted four years ago but the British author has never won any of the top three literary prizes - the Booker, the Costa and the Orange — despite being a critically acclaimed and bestselling novelist.
This time Tremain's win, with her tenth novel, came as no surprise to the publishing world and she had been the outright favourite to receive the prize at the Royal Festival Hall last night. However, the judges took almost three hours to make a decision. There was support for the Canadian Nancy Huston, whose Fault Lines is about a gifted child, and the Londoner Charlotte Mendelson, whose When We Were Bad is the story of a wife, mother and rabbi.
Ultimately, the judges felt that Tremain's book had “captured the Zeitgeist”. Critics have praised the novel for dealing so convincingly with loss and separation. The Road Home tells the story of Lev, a modern-day economic migrant, a charming but melancholy Pole. Having lost his wife to leukaemia, he comes to Britain with no job, little money and few words of English, searching for a sense of belonging.
The Times wrote: “Tremain writes so beautifully about Lev's passage from near-destitution to success that it seems perverse to complain that she hasn't made her book uglier.” At the awards ceremony, Kirsty Lang, the broadcaster and chairwoman of the Orange jury, told The Times that they were wowed by the “emotional empathy with which she wrote the lead character”.
She said: “His arrival in London is incredibly moving. We also felt the story was told with warmth and humour. In little vignettes, she draws a Dickensian array of characters, a kebab seller, a mad chef, Chinese asparagus pickers. They are true to life, a true reflection of modern Britain.” Tremain, who has made her name with books that often dramatise a moment of truth in the lives of outsiders, lives in Norfolk and London. Her book, The Colour, set in New Zealand during the 1860s West Coast Gold Rush, was shortlisted for the Orange prize in 2004, while three of her novels are currently in development as films.
The Orange prize was set up 13 years ago to celebrate and promote fiction written in English by women throughout the world. The organisers insisted yesterday that an all-women prize is still relevant, despite women winning prizes in fair competition with men. In the past two years, women have won both the Booker and Costa literary awards and the novelist A.S.Byatt told The Times earlier this year that the Orange was a sexist prize. She is so critical of what it stands for, that she forbids her publishers to submit her novels for consideration.
Although Ms Lang acknowledged that it is actually impossible to guess the sex of the author in Tremain's winning book — “she's incredibly good at writing in a male voice” — Kate Mosse, the prize's co-founder, dismissed the suggestion that the Orange prize would one day accept male authors.
She said: “An anonymous donor, a wife and mother for whom reading had been a great pleasure, set up the prize money 15 years ago. It was for a prize to celebrate international writing by women. It would be complicated to change as the woman died after the first two prizes.”
Related Links
No comments:
Post a Comment