• Commonwealth:
• News:
• News Archive Search:
• Commonwealth Writers Prize Winners

Commonwealth Writers Prize Winners

20 May 2004

British writer Caryl Phillips receives his cheque for £ 10,000 for winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award from the Hon Steve Bracks.

Caribbean-born Caryl Phillips has won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize for his novel 'A Distant Shore'. Steve Bracks, the Premier of the State of Victoria, presented Mr Phillips with the £10,000 award during a gala dinner held on 15 May 2004 at the State Library in Melbourne, Australia. Mr Phillips was born in St Kitts and Nevis and brought up in the United Kingdom. He now divides his time between London and New York, where he is currently Professor of English at Columbia University.

Mark Haddon, another British writer, won the £3,000 Best First Book Award for 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time'. Now in its 18th year, the Commonwealth Writers Prize was established by the Commonwealth Foundation in 1987 to encourage and reward the upsurge of new Commonwealth fiction and ensure that works of merit reach a wider audience outside their country of origin.

During the Awards Dinner, Colin Ball, Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, said, "While since 1987 the Prize has aimed to promote and recognise excellence in literature, today the Prize also helps us to better understand the human condition. Such understanding is vital if we are to build the 'common wealth' of all peoples. Read, as I hope you will, any of the eight books ... or those of previous winners, some of whom are with us here, and you will see how they contribute to such understanding."

The Chairman of the five-person pan-Commonwealth judging panel, Australian poet, essayist and art critic Chris Wallace-Crabbee, said, on behalf of the jury, "This book ('A Distant Shore') speaks to our age and its entropy. The story moves with the converging lives of a middle-aged Midlands woman, declining into bewilderment, and an 'illegal' who flees to England from the appalling violence of his homeland. The everyday and the appalling walk hand in hand, with utter conviction. A heartbreaking novel, 'A Distant Shore' asks whether civilisation can possibly survive."

The other shortlisted books for the Best Book Award were 'The Hamilton Case' by Australian Michelle de Kretser, 'Deafening' by Canada's Frances Itani, and 'The Good Doctor' by South African Damon Galgut.

Describing 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time', Mr Wallace-Crabbe said, "This is one of those rare works that change our sense of what fiction can do, what language can achieve. Working through a boy's autistic consciousness, it offers readers a vivid, comical, plangent drama, obliquely echoing Sherlock Holmes. More than this, it illuminates the ways in which we all perceive and think."

The other shortlisted books for the Best First Book Award were 'Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen' by Canadian Kate Taylor, South African Diane Awerbuck's 'Gardening at Night', and 'Somewhere, Home' by Lebanon-based Australian Nada Awar Jarrar.

Last year Canadian author Austin Clarke won the £10,000 Best Book Award for 'The Polished Hoe' while British writer Sarah Hall won the Best First Book prize of £3,000 for her debut novel, 'Haweswater'.