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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Australian wins pulitzer prize for fiction

astrojax69

05:50 / 21.04.06

geraldine brooks won the pulitzer for fiction - she is a dual australian / united states national.

her husband, tony horwitz, won the pulitzer for journalism in 95. bragging rights at breakfast now! (and she is the second 'brooks' after gwendolyn to win a pulitzer!)

what does barbelith think of the pulitzer? it isn't a particularly well known prize in australia other than by name. i always thought it was for journalism, but it seems there is a fiction, poetry and drama prize at least, too!

so what does a pulitzer really mean? good upon her, but...

sibyline, beating Qalyn to a Q

09:54 / 21.04.06

i would say that the pulitzer prize in fiction is essentially the american equivalent of a booker prize, even though there's also the national book award, which i think of as slightly less prestigious but also less patriotic, in that i think the pulitzer says something specifically about american life or some such.

i had not heard of "march" before it won. it's been annoying me somewhat that young authors aren't being nominated for these prizes unless they're doing reasonably traditional work. for instance, i thought both benjamin kunkel's "indecision" and nicole krauss's "the history of love" are excellent, but neither got nominations for the pulitzer or national book awards.

ShadowSax

14:05 / 21.04.06

the pulitzer is pretty prestigious, in part because it includes awards to journalism writing and producing as well as fiction. i think it's considered the pinnacle of critical success in american writing and reporting.

any book that wins it will get a look by many serious readers and writers, so, in that respect, it's a powerful award.

jebni

08:34 / 02.05.06

IMHO, there's very little to recommend about Geraldine Brooks. It's been a while, but I remember her non-fiction book Nine Parts of Desire as a revival of 19th Century Orientalist travel writing -- all leering and affronted at the same time about the exotic and backward Middle East, but mixed in with late-20th-C right-wing "power feminist" outrage and relentless narcissism for added effect. Ugh! Okay, given that I think she's eeeeevil, I guess there's something interesting going on...

ONLY NICE THINGS

10:13 / 02.05.06

This is Year of Wonders Geraldine Brooks? Only I found little to recommend her in that novel - which struck me as being a tissue of literary novelesque traits stretched over, in essence, a historical pot-boiler, and one which consistently broke my sense of time - it was well-researched in terms of its at least apparently convincing details about mining in Derbyshire in the 17th century, but every so often somebody would display far too modern a perspective - in particular, the female characters appeared to have parachhuted in from a later period, with extensive understanding of homeopathy, free love and, at one point, a knowledge of artificial respiration that appears to be a goood few centuries ahead of its time.

Has anyone read March yet?