Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Winner Meets the Queen

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Winner Meets HM the Queen

New Zealand writer, Lloyd Jones, will have an audience with Her Majesty the Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday, 24 October 2007.

The audience is part of Jones’ prize for winning the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Overall Best Book Award, for his novel, Mister Pip. The £10,000 cash prize was awarded in May as part of the Calabash International Literary Festival in Treasure Beach, Jamaica.

The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, awarded annually, aims to promote new voices, reward achievement and encourage wider readership and greater literacy, thereby increasing appreciation of different cultures and building understanding between cultures

For the second consecutive year, the overall winner of the prize has gone on to receive further accolades – Mister Pip has recently been included on the Man Booker Prize shortlist - highlighting that the international judging process put in place by the Commonwealth Foundation is at the forefront of recognising talent, identifying new voices and helping these books reach global audiences.

The 2006 overall winner, The Secret River by Kate Grenville, went on to be shortlisted for the Man Booker and to become a bestseller in both Australia and the UK. The CWP Best First Book Award is a showcase for emerging literary talent with many of the winners, such as Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Mark Haddon, going on to become international bestselling writers.

The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is organised by the Commonwealth Foundation with the support of the Macquarie Foundation across all four regions.

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Lloyd Jones’ novel is set mainly in a small village on Bougainville, where Matilda attends the school set up by the only white man in the village, Mr Watts. By his own admission he’s not much of a teacher and proceeds to educate the children by reading them Great Expectations. Matilda falls in love with the novel and the promise of the next chapter is what keeps her going; Pip’s story protects her from the horror of what is happening around her – helicopters menacing the skies above the village and rebel raids on the ground.
After several visits to the village by soldiers, the book goes missing and is then destroyed. Mr Watts encourages the children to retell the story, the whole being constructed from their remembered fragments. Later, when she has fled the island for Australia, Matilda reaches for a copy of Great Expectations in the school library and realises that Mr Watts was reading them his own version of the text, another ‘invention’ of the original.
Lloyd Jones was born in 1955 and lives in Wellington. He is currently living in Berlin as recipient of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency. In July, he also won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for fiction or poetry.

ENDS

© Scoop Media