FG misses out on UK literary award

[Mulboyne]

BBC: Hollinghurst takes Booker Prize

Author Alan Hollinghurst has won the 2004 Booker Prize for his novel, The Line of Beauty. The prestigious award is for the best novel of the last 12 months by an author from a Commonwealth country or the Republic of Ireland. Also nominated were Achmat Dangor, Sarah Hall, Colm Toibin, Gerard Woodward and bookies' favourite David Mitchell. Hollinghurst, 50, takes home a cheque for 50,000 pounds.


David Mitchell
Profile:

David Mitchell was born in Southport in January 1969 and grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire. He took a degree in English and American literature at the University of Kent and followed it with an MA in comparative literature. He then spent a year in Sicily followed by eight years in Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students.
His first novel, Ghostwritten, won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, Number9dream, was shortlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize for fiction and in 2003 he was named by Granta magazine as one of 20 best young British novelists.

[Taro Toporific]

BBC: Booker Prize
.....and bookies' favourite David Mitchell. Hollinghurst, 50, takes home a cheque for 50,000 pounds.]
David Mitchell
Profile:David Mitchell... spent a year in Sicily followed by eight years in Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students..
His first novel, Ghostwritten, won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

DAMN! He stole the name of my 1st novel:
"Ghostwritten, a Pacific
Rim Job."

[Watcher]

I read Number9Dream... wasn't that impressed with it, though. Seemed to me a cheap rip of the English translations of Murakami Haruki (of whose books I have read all) in both pace, themes, and structure, but lacking the greater twists and lyrical flow. Maybe that makes sense to you... maybe it doesn't... most literary critiques suck and I never understood these "art" prizes that England gives out. Remember "rubbish Bag"? Here's the rest of the story....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3604278.stm

[Taro Toporific]

Booker-less but unbowed
The Globe and Mail 7:36 AM EDT Tuesday, Oct 26, 2004
....[Mitchell's novel] Cloud Atlas moves from the travel diary of an earnest, 19th-century notary to the correspondence of a jaded young composer on the run from his creditors, to a China Syndrome-ish mystery set in 1970s California. From there, we meet a hilariously misguided British publisher, a genetically manufactured slave in the Korea of the near future and an intrepid boy in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. And then, the stories continue -- in reverse order....
.....The Korea of the future, where capitalism is taken to its most gruesome extreme, is called "Nea So Copros," an allusion to Japan's wartime "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."
Japan makes a brief appearance in Cloud Atlas under a new name -- "I found it historically pleasing," Mitchell says, "to be renaming it East Korea."

[Taro Toporific]

[SIZE="3"] BRITAIN'S REIGNING POSTMODERNIST
And now for something completely different[/SIZE]
Newsday---May 14, 2006
David Mitchell has three words for aspiring writers: "Sell the telly." Ten years ago, Mitchell was living in Hiroshima teaching English at a local technical college, enthusiastically participating in the country's love affair with sake, and thinking that someday he'd write a novel. Then, his future began to unfold before him.
"I was seeing people who were still teaching English in Japan 10 years after they had arrived and who could now no longer leave," he explains over tea and chocolate cake at Barmarche, a restaurant in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. "They were too old to start anything new and unemployable if they were to go back to their home countries. The best they could hope was to try and get into the university system there and somehow make out for the rest of their lives just kind of getting by."
But Mitchell, whose prose is rarely mentioned without the word "ambitious" attached to it, didn't want to just get by. He banished the proverbial blue glow from his flat - "You have so much time! ... You never regret it!" - and began spending his evenings scribbling bits of an autobiographical story on index cards...more..