Victor Nze
5 November 2009
Newly published short story collection by Nigeria's Orange Prize winner Chimamnda Ngozi Adichie is battling a Canadian medical doctor, James Maskalyk, Booker prize winner Aravind Adiga, as well as three other authors for this year's John Llewellyn Rhys prize, according to a shortlist announced Monday.
Maskalyk's memoir titled; Six Months in Sudan, about the six months he spent working in a contested Sudanese border town, started as a blog written from his hut in Abyei, Sudan in 2007, as he tried to tell his family and friends about his days working for Médecins Sans Frontières, treating malnourished children and staying out of the soldiers' way.
This work is, however, up against two heavy-hitting short story collections: Adiga's Between the Assassinations, which follows the lives of the residents of a fictional Indian town between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, and Orange prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck, whose stories are focused on exile from, and return to, Nigeria.
The £5,000 John Llewellyn Rhys prize goes to the best work of literature - including fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction - by a United Kingdom or Commonwealth writer aged 35 or under. Chair of judges, the novelist and playwright Louise Doughty, hailed a "strong, diverse [and] truly international" selection of writers shortlisted for this year's prize.
"Four different genres are represented by writers living across the globe [from] Nigeria, India, Canada, the UK and Australia," she said. "This list is a fascinating display of the range and strength of contemporary writing by young writers. It will be very hard to choose just one book from it and the prize is wide open."
Emma Jones could become the first poet to win the prize in 25 years with her debut collection The Striped World, inspired by her home country of Australia, which earlier this month took the Forward prize for best first collection. Andrew Motion was the last poet to win the John Llewellyn Rhys, taking it in 1984 for Dangerous Play.
Evie Wyld, who works in a Peckham bookshop, is shortlisted for her second novel After the Fire, a Still Small Voice. Set in eastern Australia, the novel tells of a man who moves from Canberra to a shack on the east coast to put his past behind him.
The shortlist is completed by a second piece of non-fiction, Tristram Stuart's Waste, which looks at how the profligacy of the west has created a global food crisis, and what can be done to fix it.
The prize, founded 65 years ago in honour of John Llewellyn Rhys, a writer killed during the Second World War, is the second oldest literary award in the UK. Previous winners include Margaret Drabble, Susan Hill and Angela Carter; last year's award was taken by Henry Hitchings for The Secret Life of Words - the first non-fiction book to win in six years.
This year's winner will be announced on 30 November.
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