Jerusalem Prize

[Cleanthess]

Spanish novelist extraordinaire Antonio Munoz Molina has been awarded the Jerusalem Biennial Prize for 2013. The author of The Polish Horseman and Sepharad joins the very impressive roster of former winners:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Prize
Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, Leszek Kołakowski, António Lobo Antunes, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Don DeLillo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Zbigniew Herbert, Ernesto Sabato, J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, V. S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Octavio Paz, Simone de Beauvoir, Eugène Ionesco, Jorge Luis Borges, Ignazio Silone, Max Frisch and Bertrand Russell.

The jury granted Munoz Molina the prize because he is 'one of the world's greatest literary figures of the 20th. and 21th. Centuries.'

http://noticias.latino.msn.com/entr...con-el-premio-literario-bienal-de-jerusalén-2

 

[Stiffelio]

This is good news. Is the Nobel next in line for the pretigious Albanian writer?

http://www.timesofisrael.com/albanian-writer-to-receive-jerusalem-prize/

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: Ismail Kadaré to receive Jerusalem Prize

I'm glad Kadare will be receiving this Prize. Although I do not support mostly anything Israelis do, I have to accept they've picked good laureates for this prize, making it an important recognition worldwide.
I'd to love to see Kadare rewarded with the Nobel Prize, but I do not see it happening this year. Hard to believe back to back male European writers winning.

 

[OverTheMountains]

Re: Ismail Kadaré to receive Jerusalem Prize

And I was just at a book store today, grappling with the decision to purchase The Seige or leave it for somebody else. I decided to leave it. I have two other books - both of which are supposedly quite good - and I think I am glad that I did. It forced me to explore more, and I found a book I'm quite excited to read.

 

[amylixuan]

Re: Ismail Kadaré to receive Jerusalem Prize

He receive Jerusalem Prize, but Nobel is really hard!

 

[nagisa]

Re: Ismail Kadaré to receive Jerusalem Prize

Any prizes Kadare can receive are deserved in my book (although in this case they gave it to Murakami as well, an author I don't care for much at all; still everyone makes mistakes).

 

[Sisyphus]

Re: Ismail Kadaré to receive Jerusalem Prize

This is great. I guess Kadare will have to make do with the Man Booker International, Prince of Asturias, this one etc. Too bad he'll probably never win the Nobel

 

[kpjayan]

Re: Ismail Kadaré to receive Jerusalem Prize

although in this case they gave it to Murakami as well, an author I don't care for much at all.

While I am with you on the assessment of Murakami, I'm impressed with the speech he gave there...

http://www.haaretz.com/life/arts-leisure/always-on-the-side-of-the-egg-1.270371

 

[Sisyphus]

Re: Ismail Kadaré to receive Jerusalem Prize

He received the prize today at the Jerusalem Book Fair. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a video of his speech

 

[Daniel del Real]

It seems that the Literary Prize season has officially started. In recent days the Kafka, Formentor and Jerusalem prizes have new names among its winners and the Premio Princesa de Asturias will unveil a new laureate next week.

Between these choices, selection of Karl Ove Knausgård as the winner of the Jerusalem Prize it is quite interesting. First thing that shocks me is that a writer gets an Israeli prize for basically a work named Min Kamp. You probably wouldn't have expected to see that. Second is that this is probably the first big international prize to be awarded to Knausgard. Volume 5 of My Struggle is about to appear in Spanish and I think Vol. 6 should be appearing soon in English completing translation of his monumental work in some of the most spoken languages around the world. Probably these are the years in which he probably will be a more solid candidate to big prizes around the world, probably the Nobel.

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.792494

 

[Ater Lividus Ruber & V]

Do you think it's a prerequisite for works to be available in English/major languages to be a laureate? Because it's not like the SA can't read Norwegian, whereas they had to wait for a store of translations into Swedish, English, and French for Mo Yan before they could comfortably give him the prize.

I just mean they could have given Knausgård the prize earlier because they had access to Min Kamp in its entirety some years before.

 

[Bartleby]

So it seems this year's laureate is Joyce Carol Oates. Any thoughts? I've never read her but she's one writer I don't think I'm gonna like, for the samples I read of her books failed to impress me...

 

[Cleanthess]

Reading a bunch of brilliant short stories by Rachel Ingalls and the following comment by scott g.f. bailey at Wuthering Expectations blog helped me to appreciate Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic tales (which had until now looked like some kind of poor joke to me) :

“It was Chekhov who began to write stories where a realization is given to the reader rather than the protagonist, and once the reader sees what's happened, the story ends; it doesn't matter [what happens later to] the characters in the story”.

Rachel Ingalls’ gothic short stories are much better crafted, and with a lot more care, than Oates’ tales; Ingalls’ characters are more believable than JCO's; the development of her plots more interesting. And yet, because Ingalls remains tied to the old tradition in which something horrible HAS to happen to her characters for the horror story to end, we get things like protagonists being eaten alive by frogs, or characters behaving in a manner totally incongruous with their actions earlier in the story.

Oates doesn’t bear this burden, she tries to convey certain insights to her readers, and she doesn’t care how trite or silly her plots are. Oates will place good girls in bad situations, like a good Christian girl being repeatedly drugged by her Asian scientist boyfriend and then inseminated with monkey semen while unconscious as part of an experiment; but these contrivances are only there to help elicit an emotional epiphany from us, her readers, and that explains the seemingly careless indifference towards how her stories end displayed by JCO.

And that is the extent of Oates’ achievement: to find a way to free the gothic and horror short stories from the constraints of the forced ending by bringing a little of Chekhov’s sophistication and refinement to them.

 

[Liam]

I've never read her but she's one writer I don't think I'm gonna like, for the samples I read of her books failed to impress me...

She's not a horrible writer, per se, she just overproduces and the quality of her writing suffers as a result. I find her plots a bit contrived, her characters thin, and her language workmanlike. So, not a fan. That being said, reading Oates is not a total waste of time. You just have to be highly selective and pick the right one out of her 100+ (?) books.

 

[Bartleby]

Oates will place good girls in bad situations, like a good Christian girl being repeatedly drugged by her Asian scientist boyfriend and then inseminated with monkey semen while unconscious as part of an experiment; but these contrivances are only there to help elicit an emotional epiphany from us, her readers, and that explains the seemingly careless indifference towards how her stories end displayed by JCO.

oh, now i want to read this LOL

jokes aside, yeah, i havent yet taken a look at her short stories, so maybe that’s something that will appeal to me?

what makes me cringe a bit taking quick looks at her novels is the fact that the narrators all seem to be possessed with some sort of hysteria or neurosis that makes them speak in upper case and italics and exclamations all the time .-.

but thinking about it, I’d like reading one of her novels in a reading club, not any one you’d find in some unknown site though, but one whose participants’s tastes I knew, so that if there was real merit to her work that I was missing, some other reader would point it out...

Still, even if, taking Liam's advice, I am super picky and thorough in my searchings to find her best book, and I like it, I feel I won't be satisfied, for I am too stubbornly bound to the idea of being comfortably able to assess an entire author's work, and with her ever so varied output, one would assume varying drastically in quality as well, I just wouldn't want to do so... But that's just me.
Of course I'm ok with writers of only one book, said book being great, or even a writer of some works received with indiference save for one, but in theses cases usually you have history on their side, her case is different, her being a contemporary, and being who she is (I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, after reading something by her and liking it I'll feel like I couldn't count on repeating the good experience with many more of her books) ... I don't know, I'm rambling already, that's what happens when I can't sleep, sorry for the long post

 

[Ben Jackson]

For me, the Prize with the most impressive recipients (maybe even ahead of the Nobel), Jerusalem Prize, which began in 1965, has awarded to writers with international repute (some have been awarded/shortlisted for the Nobel). Among all the recipients, the only writers I haven't read is De Lillo, Isaiah Berlin, Munoz Molina, Semprun, Knausgaard, Silone, Sabato, Kolakowski, Herbert. Hope to read them.

The 2021 recipient was Julian Barnes. I have read two books of his: Flaubert's Parrot and Sense of an Ending, and I can say he's a beautiful writer.