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The winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2007 will be announced later on today and I have been making my way through (most of) this year’s shortlist. Above all, my favourite read has been Dinaw Mengestu’s novel Children of the Revolution. Telling the story of Sepha Stephanos, owner of a rather forlorn and dilapidated general store in an area of Washington DC that has been left neglected for years, Mengestu diligently tracks the experience of the lost immigrant in America. Sepha fled the Ethiopian revolution seventeen years ago – after witnessing his father being beaten to death, his mother being abused and realising that there was no consolation he could provide for his petrified brother – he began to forge his path towards the new world and the promises that it held.

The main characters of the book are three immigrant friends – one Ethiopian, Sepha, one Congolese, Joseph, and one Kenyan, Kenneth – a white woman, Judith and her mixed-race daughter, Naomi. Although there are obvious disparities in race and gender amongst these people, their purpose is a shared one: they all wish to find a convivial space in which to live in the city. The novel is therefore set in the in-between spaces (this is not to say that it doesn’t touch on some pertinent issues), often awkward and often destructive but that always seem to hold the potential for a more positive existence. At the point the reader enters the Sepha’s life, the rundown area of the city that he inhabits is in the process of being redeveloped and rejuvenated. This should be a good thing but of course it is being developed for the wealthy white community, rather than for the predominantly black community that currently make their homes there, so it leads to animosity between the two factions. His meeting Judith, one of the more affluent members of the community (or the only affluent member of the community and a beacon of optimism for him) and her precocious daughter Naomi, beckons a new hope for him and his life seems to be on the brink of change. However, for all his efforts and aspirations, external forces and his own idealisations reinforce his position as lonely foreigner:

This year was going to be different. I was going to celebrate Christmas twice, properly on both occasions. I had something in America that I had never planned or thought I would have before: the beginnings of a life.

The novel presents a vision of America that our eyes are not frequently opened to, one of displacement and alienation for those that are searching for a home in a country that promises so much, away from the terrors that have ripped the life they knew to shreds in the name of ‘revolution’. The hero of the novel is neither successful nor content, what instead Mengestu does is something riskier with his prose: he presents us with a lonely, depressed and isolated character that is fearful of his future and unwilling to go back to his past, a man who wants to carve his way into American life but is just unable to do so.

I had never wrapped a present before, and now, I decided, it was time I learned to do so. I wanted each of the presents to come out looking like the boxes under Judith’s tree, but the more I cut and contorted the paper to try to fit it around the hard edges of the box, the more I realized that was never going to happen. A few times I came close to achieving the effect I wanted, but it wasn’t enough for me anymore. [...] None of them fitted the wrapping paper the way I needed them to. I tried measuring out pieces of wrapping paper to fit each individual side of each box. There was always something a little off: a corner would be showing, or another corner would have too much paper. The edges were always the problem. Every flat surface was perfect. It was only when I tried to get around the corners that I got stuck.

Don’t get me wrong, I would not want you to infer that Children of the Revolution is a depressing read: it’s not. It’s a necessary read and one that demands attention, full of the longings of an individual, the desire for significant human relationships and what it is that really constitutes making a home.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

It’s a book that has received mixed reviews, often a sign of something interesting and good and long lasting. Enright said in an interview with Mark Thwaite: ‘The successful writer wrote about sixteen crap books, and kept working them, and rearranging them until one less crap book was born. Never look at your work and despair – this is hard, it takes nerves of steel – look at your work and then work at it.’

Maybe ships coming in isn’t the best metaphor here. Anne Enright lives in Bray, County Wicklow, a place I associate with hard work. One summer my wife and I toiled up Bray Head on a tandem after a ten days on the road with all our gear. We were hot, and tired, and we wanted an ice cream. About half way up, with the sun beating down and the heat rising from the tarmac, a man on a racing bike pulled up alongside and we talked a while about the trip as we turned the pedals. Reaching the top he pulled away shouting ‘you’ve been blessed’ back at us. And we had.

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More: Booker prize longlist announced; Booker 2007 Shortlist; The Booker Prize: Those Readability Stats in Full.

Forget Philip Roth, Claudio Magris and Milan Kundera, all of whom have been tipped often. Forget, too, that obscure Szechuan storyteller with the unpronounceable name published by Serpent’s Tail or the Hayseed Press. Here is a great contemporary woman novelist and London intellectual who has dedicated her long life and impressive body of work to the tireless and unflinching exploration of man’s (and woman’s) place in the world, together with issues of race, gender and social justice. This prize finally acknowledges what has been true for at least 40 years: that she is one of the most important literary voices of her generation.

The feature in the Observer includes commentary on Lessing by several writers and fans, including our very own Jane Davis.

Tom Sperlinger, whose 2005 interview with Lessing appeared in The Reader magazine and which you can read here, sent me this piece in response to the news:

In a recent introduction to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Doris Lessing recalls once giving a lift to a young solider ‘in an unusual state of mind’. He ‘could not stop talking’, she writes, ‘he was in love’. During the journey, he pulled out a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and said that ‘he had never read anything like it, well, he wasn’t really a reader, actually this was the only book he had ever read. But he had read it several times, and kept finding new things in it.’

‘Surely,’ Lessing writes, ‘this youth, who was soon going to be married, was Lawrence’s ideal reader’.

Who is the ideal reader of one of Lessing’s novels? Maybe a teenager, or young man or woman; someone in an unusual state of mind, perhaps in love. She certainly appeals to some who do not otherwise think of themselves as readers.

Who does read Lessing?

This question has occurred to me frequently over the past few years, because there is no other author whom I have recommended with such mixed results. I am only just back on speaking terms with the members of my mother’s book group, all of whom hated Love, Again.

In other cases her books have been a revelation or a surprise. I gave Mara and Dann, an adventure story set after another ice age, to a friend, R, who teaches literature at a university. Though he received the gift politely, he couldn’t disguise his skepticism. A few weeks later he sent me a text saying ‘Mara seems more prescient every day’. This was the summer of 2005, around the time of the floods in New Orleans. ‘Don’t tell me how it ends,’ he pleaded.

I lent The Good Terrorist to my housemate J, a beautifully undisciplined reader, who never keeps a book after he has finished it. He said it was the best book he had read in years, and talked unguardedly about his own memories of living in a squat and getting in trouble with the police. Two other housemates, A and A, all-but fought over who would be the first to read On Cats. The winner carried it about with her for days and, soon after, bought a kitten. We considered naming him after Lessing’s El Magnifico and still think of him as our Lessing cat.

I plucked up the courage to teach Lessing last year, on an MA course on women’s writing. To my surprise, almost all of the students loved The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. ‘Does it remind you of anything else you’ve read?’ I asked them, towards the end of the seminar. One said: ‘I’ve never read anything like this.’

It’s a wonderful thought that after yesterday’s announcement many new readers will find Lessing’s works for the first time.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature. One can’t help but add ‘at last!’ She should have won it in about 1970, shouldn’t she?

I am writing at my desk in the office so don’t have my collected of works of Doris to hand and will have to write all this from memory. I began to read her in 1974, the year my daughter Sian, now 33 was born. I was 19 years old, knew nothing and had no education but I had found the Women’s Movement and on the bookshelves of my sisters were The Books of Sisterhood and of those books I started with Martha Quest. I must be representative of many women who read the Children of Violence series with a desperate life-hunger. Tell my story, we said as one, struggling around the nappy bucket (no disposables then, girls) while our lefty men went out to meetings and plotted world revolution. So far so normal.

The Golden Notebook, informed opinion seems to be, will be the book Doris is remembered for, and I did love it, its structure, its multi-tasking shape, its dear women. But it is not the one for my money. The Four Gated City – with its apocalyptic vision of a ruined world and amazing and broken minds, seemed a story of the frightening world I lived in. But it is not the one. I felt afraid of and sorely troubled by Memoirs of A Survivor, which I must have read about twenty times in the space of a few years, as if my reading mind sensed some vital nutrient there and yet could not release…but it is not the one. Briefing for a Descent Into Hell was the very first new hardback book I bought – a large-scale financial investment for a single mother working as a waitress in a café. And worth it, but not the one.

Go read Shikasta (and the four books that follow in Canopus In Argos) oh falling world, and recognise the genius of the woman who has picked up and transformed the George Eliot vision of the place and meaning of belief in a world that is past it. Read Shikasta and ask: what am I for? That is the question Doris lived to write for us.

The prize is like a very, very late birthday card. Should have arrived sooner but sent with good heart, so let’s enjoy it while re-reading this marvellous uncategorisable woman.

PS – got my husband through Shikasta too, and we are still fighting the battle of the sexes joyfully together twenty five years on… I owe that woman so much.

By Jane Davis

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Read an interview with Doris Lessing from The Reader magazine here.

We reported on the shortlist back in August.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana

Eleanor has also recently launched a collaborative piece with writer Rachel Rogers for Merseyside Dance Initative documenting the rehearsal process for The Migrant Body project, a collaboration of European dancers and experimental choreography. She is also working with artist Jyll Bradley on The Fragrant Project responding to the complex history of Liverpool Botanical Collection as part of the Liverpool Commissions for 2008. This is due to launch August 2007.

Eleanor’s website is here and she also has a myspace page which is here.

Here’s the complete 2007 shortlist:

Best collection prize (£10,000)

Domestic Violence by Eavan Boland (Carcanet)
Gift Songs by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)
The Drowned Book by Sean O’Brien (Picador)
Birds with a Broken Wing by Adam Thorpe (Jonathan Cape)
The Harbour Beyond the Movie by Luke Kennard (Salt Publishing)
Beasts of Nalunga by Jack Mapanje (Bloodaxe)

Best first collection prize (£5,000)

Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues on Dimitri Shostakovich by Joanna Boulter (Arc Publications)
Galatea by Melanie Challenger (Salt Publishing)
Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra (Faber and Faber)
Andraste’s Hair by Eleanor Rees (Salt Publishing)

Best single poem prize (£1,000)

The Hut in Question by David Harsent (Poetry Review)
Thursday by Lorraine Mariner (The Rialto)
Dunt by Alice Oswald (Poetry London)
The Day I Knew I Wouldn’t Live Forever by Carole Satyamurti (The Interpreter’s House)
Goulash by Myra Schneider (The North)
The Birkdale Nightingale by Jean Sprackland (Poetry Review)

Posted by Chris Routledge

Simic’s appointment was announced by James H Billington, the librarian of Congress. Asked why Simic was chosen from the shortlist of 15 candidates, Billington replied that it was down to "the rather stunning and original quality of his poetry … His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears. He’s very hard to describe, and that’s a great tribute to him."

Speaking by telephone from his home, Simic described himself as a "city poet", joking that he has "lived in cities all of my life, except for the last 35 years." He originally wanted to be a painter, he said, until "I realised that I had no talent."

Here’s the link to The Guardian and another to the New York Times.

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It is without any question the most important honour I have ever received, and the one I treasure the most,” said Pullman. “Personally I feel they got the initials right but not the name. I don’t know if the result would be the same in a hundred year’s time; maybe Philippa Pearce would win then. All we do know is that librarians will continue to choose well and to celebrate the best of writing for children and young people.”

More from The Guardian.

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I utterly resent and reject the notion that you can teach reading without books,” he told journalists after his appointment.

“There is a huge push on to create an environment – in nurseries, and reception, and year ones and year twos – where books are secondary to the process of reading. This seems oxymoronic to me. We must, must have at the heart of learning to read the pleasure that is reading. Otherwise why bother? You could learn phonics, learn how to read and then put it behind you and watch telly – you’re given no reason to read. There are many ways in which people learn how to read; the idea that there is one way is an outrageous fib.

Here’s the link to the article. The Children’s Laureate post is administered by the charity Booktrust.

[Edit] The Guardian’s Michael Rosen obsession coverage continues today with an interview. Read it here.

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