Indian journalist loses to American author
Lady Gaga arrives for a taping of the Late Show with David Letterman in New York on Monday.
Author Gary Shteyngart was on Tuesday named winner of the Wodehouse book prize for his third novel Super Sad True Love Story, it was announced on Tuesday. Indian journalist Manu Joseph’s debut novel Serious Men had made the five-book shortlist.
Shteyngart, who was named by the New Yorker magazine among the best 20 writers under 40 years, is the first American to win the very English prize. Shteyngart’s dystopian tale set in a near-future, functionally illiterate America on the brink of collapse.
Along with Manu Joseph, who is the editor of Open Magazine, first-time novelist Sam Leith’s The Coincidence Engine, British columnist India Knight’s Comfort and Joy and Costa award winner Catherine O’Flynn’s The News Where You Are had been shortlisted for the prize.
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction is awarded annually to a novel that best captures the comic spirit of British writer P.G. Wodehouse.
Last year, Booker Prize-winner Ian McEwan’s Solar won the prize and previous award-winners include Booker winners Howard Jacobson and DBC Pierre.
Shteyngart will be presented with his prize: a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année and a collection of 70 novels by P.G. Wodehouse on June 4, when he will speak about his book at the Hay Festival at Hay-on-Wye in Wales.
Keeping with the Wodehousian spirit, Shteyngart will be honoured with the presentation of a locally-bred Gloucestershire Old Spot pig, who has now been be named after the title of his book, Sad True Love Story.
Hay Festival director Peter Florence, who was on the three-member judging panel including broadcaster and author James Naughtie and publisher David Campbell, “described Shteyngart’s writing a thrilling.
“He’s a staggeringly clever satirist who manages to create worlds and people of perfect coherence and outrageous misfortune. This is great literature and it’s wild comedy,” Peter Florence said.
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