Zimbabwe author wins Caine prize

12 July 2011 Last updated at 14:20 GMT NoViolet Bulawayo was born and raised in Zimbabwe and studied in the US Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo has won this year's Caine Prize for African Writing, regarded as Africa's leading literary award.

The ?10,000 ($16,000) prize was given for her story Hitting Budapest about hungry children from a shantytown who steal guavas from an upmarket suburb.

She told the BBC: "I try to write stories that don't normally get told."

The chair of judges said the gang of "poor and violated" children were "reminiscent of Clockwork Orange".

"The language of Hitting Budapest crackles," said judge chair Hisham Matar, who announced the winner at a prize-giving ceremony in the UK city of Oxford on Monday evening.

"This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language."

At the beginning of the story, first published in The Boston Review last year, the narrator explains why the children are heading for Budapest: "There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I'd die for guavas, or anything for that matter."

"There they encounter this lady from London who is more interested in taking their picture, which I guess happens when Westerners go to Africa, but she fails to realise that they are hungry," Ms Bulawayo told the BBC's Network Africa.

One of the children is a 10-year-old girl who has seemingly been made pregnant by her grandfather.

"It's very, very wrong but in this environment it's normalised," she says.

Ms Bulawayo says she identifies with the characters - Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho - and in the story she is "marrying the personal with the imaginary".

"Some of these incidents in Hitting Budapest are taken from my own life - the stealing of guavas to begin with, growing up less privileged and having these dreams."

NoViolet Bulawayo was born and raised in Zimbabwe and recently completed a masters degree at Cornell University in the US.

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Damage author Hart dies in London

3 June 2011 Last updated at 15:22 GMT Hart also founded West End Poetry Hour at the British Library Irish-born author Josephine Hart, whose 1991 debut novel, Damage, was made into a film starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, has died in London.

A spokeswoman for her husband, Lord Saatchi, said Hart, who had cancer, died on Thursday.

Her literary agent, Ed Victor, said she was in her late 60s, but that she was "coy and secretive" about her age.

Hart also produced a number of West End plays, including Coward's The Vortex and Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince.

Other bestselling novels include Sin, Oblivion, The Stillest Day and The Reconstructionist.

'True voice'

Before becoming a writer, she worked in publishing. She also founded West End Poetry Hour at the British Library, in which actors including Dame Judi Dench and Simon Callow read works by major poets.

In the late 1980s, she presented the ITV series Books by My Bedside, in which she interviewed authors including Jackie Collins and Martin Amis.

In a recent interview with the literary website Book Rabbit, Hart said her philosophy was to "wait for the true voice of your narrator, surrender, totally, during the actual writing, separate, ruthlessly, during the editing".

"It's solitary work," she added.

"Art as Yeats said, is a solitary man - or woman."

She is survived by two sons.

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Peruvian author wins book prize

27 May 2011 Last updated at 10:09 GMT At 36, Santiago Roncagliolo is the youngest author to win the prize Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his third novel, Red April.

The writer beat competition from the likes of Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk to become the youngest person to win the prize at 36.

He shares his ?10,000 award with the translator of his novel, American Edith Grossman.

The prize is given to a living author whose book has been translated into English and published in the UK.

Roncagliolo's political thriller, translated from Spanish, tells of a Peruvian prosecutor in charge of a murder investigation.

Judge and literary editor at the Independent Boyd Tonkin described Red April as "a novel that will grip, excite, disturb and challenge all its readers".

Roncagliolo said: "The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize closes a wonderful 'British season' for me and my book.

"I am very happy to have won, but I was already honoured to be on the longlist, to be considered in the same league as such amazing writers."

Edith Grossman said: "Translating the work of a fine writer is sheer pleasure: the better the writing, the more satisfying the challenge for the translator.

"I so enjoyed the opportunity to bring the work of Santiago over into English. His use of language is clean and sharp and perceptive, and regardless of the kind of piece he has written, that wonderful quality is constant."

The other authors shortlisted for the prize included Pamuk for his novel, The Museum of Innocence, Norwegian Per Petterson for I Curse the River of Time and Kamchatka by the Argentine Marcelo Figueras.

The Sickness from Venezuelan author Alberto Barrera Tyszka and Visitation, the third novel by German writer Jenny Erpenbeck were also nominated.

Last year's prize went to Philippe Claudel for Brodeck's Report, translated from the French by American John Cullen.

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