Neustadt Prize Research Articles

Indigenous Voices

Indigenous Voices Greetings fromBurundi, in theheart of Africa. Iwas pleased to see that you included translations from Isthmus Zapotec in yourMay 2009 issue (Victor Ter?n, "Three Poems," 24-25). Because of thegenocide thathas affected East Africa, many western ers are familiarwith theHutus and the Tutsis, but fewer have heard of the Batwa. My people were the region's original inhabitants,much like the San of South Africa. Like your Native Americans, our lands were taken by force,by African col onizers who were later colonized themselves. Today we are still land less, forced to move from place to place at the whim of our govern ment. We face great discrimination at all levels of social interaction, especially within the Burundian educational system. I am grateful forWorld Litera ture Today's continued efforts to illu minate world indigenous cultures, both creatively and critically. The publication of Ter?n's poems?and all indigenous poetry?represents a great victory to us, as it allows oth ers to appreciate the value of our cultures. I eagerly await a Kirundi edition! Thank you. TheHonorable EtienneNdayishimiye National Parliament ofBurundi Kia ora fromKapiti Island, a nature reserve inNew Zealand, where I am currently the Maori writer in resi dence during Matariki (theMaori New Year). Surrounded by birdsong and native bush, I eagerly read the tribute toPatricia Grace featured in yourMay 2009 issue. Igrew up with Patricia Grace's tales, from reading The Kuia and theSpider as a child, to reading her short-story collec tions as a teenager, to reading her longer fiction as an adult. It was tremendously significant tome that W LT A 7 . '? r Om Xi.ioloncj ^ Op.ilKilmer Aciis.i Patricia Grace Igrew upwith Patricia Grace's tales, from reading The Kuia and the Spider as a child, to reading her short-storycollections as a teenager, to reading her longer fictionas an adult. As an emerging Maori writer, Ifind it inspiring that one of our finest Maori writers has been recognized forher deeply resonant storytelling with the Neustadt Prize. these storieswere written by aMaori woman about Maori experience, but itwas also encountering her "gener osity of spirit/' as Christina Thomp son perfectlydescribes it,that leftan impression on my heart and mind. As an emergingMaori writer, I find it inspiring that one of our finest Maori writers has been recognized forher deeply resonant storytelling with theNeustadt Prize. Thank you, World Literature Today, for also hon oring one of the Aotearoa's treasures. Kelly Joseph New Zealand Andrew Horton consistently beats thedrum for worldwide indigenous films and now forWorld Literature Today. In his essay "Indigenous Sto ries Reaching Out to theWorld" (WLT,May 2009, 50-54), Dr. Horton this time directs our focus to the FirstNations filmsofNew Zealand and the United States. This essay once again illuminates thathe is a one-man Sundance and more. How much better our aesthetic lives would be if we were to claim posses sion of all the filmsProfessorHorton mentions inhis essay! Lew Hunter UCLA Have a comment or suggestion? Send a letter to the editor via the feedback link on our website ormail to: WL T Letters 630 Parrington Oval, Suite 110 University of Oklahoma Norman,OK 73019-4033 USA 4 i World Literature Today ...

The Neustadt Prize

The Neustadt Prize

Highlights from the Neustadt Prize Conference

Highlights from the Neustadt Prize Conference

A Writer's Writer: Two Perspectives

S J. M. Coetzee's fiction strips bare the veneer that protects us, and it ventures unflinchingly into territory of mind and experience most of us are afraid to face. Yet he writes with a sparseness and reticence that keep his work from being overtaxed or overwrought. He treats human pain and weakness with respect and refrains from judgment. At the same time, every work of his explores important sociopolitical issues and their psychological impact, and in every fictional act he reaches for the limits of human endurance. There are echoes of the classical in his novels: intimations of Kafka and Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky and Beckett, because of the way he fuses the intellectual and the psychological. Coetzee is a writer for our time who possesses the courage and the imagination and the skill to probe in fiction what needs to be explored, and he does so while maintaining readability and focus. Since his first novel, Coetzee has shown consistency, continuity, and sustainability and has won important literary prizes with almost every book he has published. For Coetzee to win the Neustadt Prize at this time would be to recognize a body of work that is important, thoughtprovoking, and of outstanding quality. There are many reasons for recommending Coetzee for the Neustadt Prize. He is a writer of

Introducing the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature

Introducing the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature

On Nuruddin Farah

On Nuruddin Farah Jacqueline Bardolph (bio) The International Neustadt Prize was conferred in 1998 to Somali author Nuruddin Farah by a jury of writers from all over the world. Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, and Czeslaw Milosz have been among the recipients, altogether fifteen of them, eleven of whom were later awarded the Nobel. After the prize given to Assia Djebar, it is another recognition of the importance of African literature on the world scene. One can think of many reasons that justify such a distinction. In themselves, some features of the life and personality of this novelist are unusual, yet represent a sort of summary of the troubles and strifes of many artists from the African continent. An unusual life, since Farah had to live in exile, under threat from the dictator Siyad Barre, for over twenty years. All that time, he kept alive the “country in his mind,” In his books, only to discover a shattered nation when he finally came back to Mogadiscio in 1996. His life is unusual in the number of languages, alphabets, and world views that shaped him as a youth: Somali, Arabic, Amharic, English, Italian, Punjabi, to which he later added other African and European languages. Ironically, his first novel, serialized in the daily paper in the newly transcribed Somali, was promptly silenced by the regime. He then chose to write in English, the language left by the temporary connection of Northern Somalia with Britain. He thus finds himself with a small readership at home, no support from a nation or from Commonwealth institutions: an isolated position that he turned into a source of strength. More unusual even is his attitude: in all his travels for over two decades, he has chosen not to settle in either Britain or the US, although he has often taught or been resident writer there for short periods. The nomad has no roots, but an African space that is home, and his space has been Nigeria, the Sudan, Gambia, and now South Africa. Journalists are often fascinated by this unusual life: yet the writers of the Neustadt have certainly chosen to award this distinction for the simple reason that his books are good. For a long time he was considered a writer’s writer, admired by his peers, praised by Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Robert Coover, and many others, but not part of the canon and not very familiar in Africa or anglophone countries. True, the novels were not easy to find and they were thought to be rather difficult for secondary schools, but demanding works have a lasting power that is now finally being recognized outside the world of specialists. One can think of three main reasons the text could be considered baffling, not easy to classify—three reasons that are at the core of their lasting power on readers. Farah’s novels have a way of never reflecting dominant accepted thinking. From his first novel, his stance has not been the expected one. From a Crooked Rib is the story of a young country woman who comes to town to escape from marriage to an old man. The simple tale has been read as a [End Page 119] national allegory or as a feminist tract. Probably true, but one has to face the fact that the plot is a disturbing reversal of the usual moralistic Jane-comes-to-town story: Ebla finds herself as a person and lives happily off two different men. Where is the lesson? This early text, at once earnest and ironical, already acts like a riddle. The two trilogies are the impressive achievement of the years of exile. In the first, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, one would think that attacking dictatorships is a fairly consensual theme. Yet there is moral comfort in the position of victim, as the novels aim to demonstrate, from the Somali example, that arbitrary power begins inside the home. Along Reichian lines, Farah not only shows how violence and cowardice are bred in a patriarchal society (Sweet and Sour Milk), but even how matriarchs condone and extend the system, when, for example, a grandmother insists on her grand-daughter’s excision...

On Nuruddin Farah

The International Neustadt Prize was conferred in 1998 to Somali author Nuruddin Farah by a jury of writers from all over the world. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, and Czeslaw Milosz have been among the recipients, altogether fifteen of them, eleven of whom were later awarded the Nobel. After the prize given to Assia Djebar, it is another recog? nition ofthe importance of African literature on the world scene. One can think of many reasons thatjustify such a distinction. In themselves, some features of the life and personality of this novelist are unusual, yet represent a sort of summary of the troubles and strifes of many artists from the African continent. An unusual life, since Farah had to live in exile, under threat from the dictator Siyad Barre, for over twenty years. All that time, he kept alive the country in his mind, In his books, only to discover a shattered nation when he finally came back to Mogadiscio in 1996. His life is unusual in the number of languages, alphabets, and world views that shaped him as a youth: Somali, Arabic, Amharic, English, Italian, Punjabi, to which he later added other African and European languages. Ironically, his first novel, serialized in the daily paper in the newly transcribed Somali, was promptly silenced by the regime. He then chose to write in English, the language left by the temporary connec? tion of Northern Somalia with Britain. He thus finds himself with a small

Nuruddin Farah: A Tale of Two Trilogies

less through his first two novels. From a Crooked Rib and A Naked Needle, as impressive as these are as novelistic debuts, than from the next three, Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame, which form a trilogy Farah has named Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. These three novels were published in relatively quick succession, appearing between 1979 and 1983. The pace of Farah's production as a novelist has slowed: Maps, the first installment of a second trilogy, appeared in 1986, but its successor novels, Gifts and Secrets, were published in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Although contemporary African writers have linked their works together in a number of ways (Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease coming to mind as one example), Farah is unique in anglophone African writing and in postcolonial anglophone fiction in general in utilizing the trilogy as a form, not just once but twice. A number of questions are posed by the centrality of these two trilogies to Farah's oeuvre. What attracts him to the form of the trilogy? How do these novels work together to form a trilogy? Do the two trilogies work the same way? What continuities are there between them, what resemblances, what departures? These questions take on a fresh form with the completion of the second, as yet unnamed trilogy; so they are worth asking upon the present occasion as we celebrate the awarding of the 1998 Neustadt Prize to this fascinating and unique writer. Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship is a very different kind of title from the striking titles of the individual books which constitute the first

Encomium for Assia Djebar, 1996 Neustadt Prize Laureate

Encomium for Assia Djebar, 1996 Neustadt Prize Laureate

Creation in the Poetic Development of Kamau Brathwaite

tinguished themselves as poets and prose writers, who can recite poetry with rhythm and melody, not many who have endeavored to create nation language and make poetry truly native. Kamau Brathwaite, who has now become the Neustadt Prize laureate for 1994, has all these attributes and accomplishments, as well as the great honor of freeing poetry in English from the tyranny of dying of ossified main tradition. In his 1982 lectures at the Centre for Commonwealth Literature and Research in

The 1986 Neustadt Prize Presented in Zürich

The 1986 Neustadt Prize Presented in Zürich

Presentation of Max Frisch to the 1986 Neustadt Prize Jury

Presentation of Max Frisch to the 1986 Neustadt Prize Jury

Ethics at the Crossroads: The Czech "Dissident Writer" as Dramatic Character

In a survey of contemporary national literatures it seems only sensible to speak of a "Czech literature," as well as of "Czech drama." After all, Czech writers have lately been making their marks with increasing clarity on the international literary scene. Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting has reached the best-seller list in the United States; Vaclav Havel's and Pavel Kohout's plays are performed in many countries and languages; Josef Skvorecky has received the prestigious Neustadt Prize; Ludvik Vaculik publishes essays in the New York Review; Ivan Klima's plays are performed in Canada; Jiti Grusa's prose attracts international praise. If we consider the biographies of the writers, however, we find that speaking of a "Czech literature," though true in one way, misleads in another.