 Store Categories
|
Commonwealth Writers' Prize
Commonwealth Writers' Prize
The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is a leading award for fiction. The aim of the Prize is to encourage new Commonwealth fiction, and to ensure that works of merit reach a wider audience outside their country of origin. It was first awarded in 1987. The Commonwealth Writers Prize awards the Best Book and the Best First Book for each of the regions of Europe/South Asia, South East Asia/South Pacific, Canada/Caribbean and Africa. The overall Best Book for the year and Best First Book for the year are chosen from these region winners. The objectives of the prize are to promote new voices, reward achievement, encourage wider readership and greater literacy, thereby increasing appreciation of different cultures and building understanding between cultures. Website: www.commonwealthfoundation.com/culturediversity/writersprize
|
Latest News Aminatta Forna has won the 2011 Commonwealth Writer's Prize Best Book for The Memory of Love. The Best First Book was won by Craig Cliff for A Man Melting. Rana Dasgupta has won the 2010 Commonwealth Writer's Prize Best Book for Solo. The Best First Book was won by Glenda Guest for Siddon Rock. The Adventures of Vela by Albert Wendt, has won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the Asia Pacific Region. The overall winners for Best Book and Best First Book will be decided on Monday 12 April 2010. |
There is an ancient saying that when lovers fall out, a plane goes down. This is the story of one such plane. Why did a Hercules C130, the world's sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988? Was it because of: mechanical failure, human error, the CIA's impatience, a blind woman's curse, generals not happy with their pension plans, the... $27.59 $26.21
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall masters from Balzac to Dickens, this magnificant novel caputures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic... $30.66 $29.13
A son worries he is becoming too perfect a copy of his father. The co-owner of a weight-loss camp for teens finds himself running the black market in chocolate bars. A man starts melting and nothing can stop it, not even poetry. This terrific collection of stories by an exciting new talent moves from the serious and realistic to the humorous and outlandish, each story copying an element from the... $29.99 $28.49
Vikram Seth's novel is at its core a love story, the tale of Lata - and her mother's attempts to find her a suitable husband, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. Set in post-Independence India and involving the lives of four large families and those who orbit them, it is also a vast panoramic exploration of a whole continent at a crucial hour as a sixth of the world's population... $36.79 $34.95
It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals, but as a conscien-tious but far from fanatical soldier, whose main aim is to have a peaceful war, he proves in time to be civilised, humorous - and a consumate musician. When the local doctor's daughter's letters to... $28.61 $27.19
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he see as as a show trial designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness. He preempts the authorities and leaves... $27.59 $26.21
On a country property a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of species of gum trees on his land. When Ellen is nineteen her father announces his decision: she will marry the man who can name each eucalypt, down to the last tree! A modern fairy tale! $28.62 $27.20
An inventive and original novel from this multi-award-winning author. Lloyd Jones' new novel is set mainly in a small village on Bougainville, a country torn apart by civil war. Mathilda attends the school set up by Mr Watts, the only white man on the island. By his own admission he's not much of a teacher and proceeds to educate the children by reading them Great Expectations. Mathilda falls in... $35.78 $33.98
Longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize Shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize A haunting tale of an Africa and an adolescence undergoing tremendous changes by a talented young Nigerian writer. The limits of fifteen-year-old Kambili's world are defined by the high walls of her family estate and the dictates of her repressive and fanatically religious father. Her life is regulated by schedules:... $26.56 $25.24
'Nothing interests Maman today, not even Jean, her favorite child ...She acts dumb, bewitched, like a goat that the neighborhood children have fed sorghum beer.' These extraordinary stories centre on African conflicts as seen through the eyes of children and describes their resilience and endurance in heartbreaking detail. From child trafficking to inter-religious conflicts, Uwem Akpan reveals in... $30.66 $29.13
A blind man approaches his one hundredth birthday in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital. Frail and introspective, he spends his time musing on a magazine piece he read some years ago, before he lost his sight: explorers had come upon a company of jungle parrots that still spoke snatches of the language of an extinct society. The birds were then captured, caged and sent home, in the hope that linguists... $29.99 $28.49
Journey through the many stories and worlds of the immortal Vela - Vela, so red and ugly at birth they called him the Cooked; Vela the lonely admirer of pigs and the connoisseur of feet; Vela the lover of song maker Mulialofa the Boneman. Follow him down through the centuries on his travels, encountering the single-minded society of the Tagatanei and the Smellocracy of Olfact. Accompany him, too,... $35.78 $33.98
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone... $27.59 $26.21
At a cafe table in Lahore, a Pakistani man converses with a stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting...Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by an elite firm and thrives on New York and the intensity of his work. And his infatuation with fragile Erica promises entree into Manhattan society... $28.62 $27.20
William Thornhill is sentenced in 1806 to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and children in tow, he arrives in a harsh land that feels at first like a death sentence. But among the convicts there is a whisper that freedom can be bought, an opportunity to start afresh. $37.82 $35.94
At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye on to that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is... $38.84 $36.89
Beginning in America, and spilling back over memories and generations to India, Unaccustomed Earth explores the heart of family life and the immigrant experience. Eight luminous stories - longer and richer than any Jhumpa Lahiri has yet written - take us from America to Europe, India and Thailand as they follow new lives forged in the wake of loss. $28.61 $27.19
Displaying 1 to 17 (of 17 products)
|
