Ondaatje Prize shortlist spans globe from Ireland to Sri Lanka
From a poetry collection about rural Ireland to a tour of modern
Russia dubbed an 'anti-travelogue', six books have been shortlisted for
one of the UK's more unusual literary prizes: the RSL Ondaatje Award,
which goes to the book which best evokes 'the spirit of a place'.
Worth
£10,000, the Ondaatje can be won by fiction, nonfiction or poetry, with
judges Kate Adie, Moniza Alvi and Mark Lawson this year selecting one
poetry title for their shortlist, Jane Clarke's The River.
Alvi praised Clarke's 'quiet, lucid, subtle poems', which she said
were 'nevertheless urgent in their presentation of a farming background
in rural Ireland, and the poet's enduring attachment to it'.
Clarke, who combines her writing with work as a management consultant
in not-for-profit organisations, is up against five nonfiction titles
for this year's prize. James Rebanks was picked for his account of
shepherding, The Shepherd's Life, a bestseller that Alvi said was
'compelling, authentic and absolutely unromanticised', revealing 'an
honourable tradition in a changing rural world'. Alexandra Harris's look
at writers' responses to English weather over the centuries, Weatherland,
also made the list, praised by Alvi for making 'an original contribution
to the 'spirit of place'.
Brian Dillon's look at the history of explosives through a 1916 fire
at a munitions factory in Kent, The Great Explosion, was also picked by
judges, alongside Samanth Subramanian's history of the Sri Lankan civil
war, This Divided Island, and Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing Is True and
Everything Is Possible. Lawson called Pomerantsev's contender 'a sort of
anti-travelogue, making the reader desperately keen never to go near the
places described: the Muscovite, Siberian, American and English haunts
of those who became super-rich from the division of state assets and the
new entrepreneurial possibilities that arose in post-Soviet Russia'.
The winner will be announced on May 23, joining former winners
including Alan Johnson, who won for a memoir of his childhood This Boy,
and Justin Marozzi's history of Baghdad, City of Peace, City of Blood. |