The winners of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize were announced at special ceremony in May during Australia’s largest literary event, the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Eight regional winners competed for the titles of Best Book and Best First Book, which come with an award of £10,000 and £5,000 respectively. The judges felt that the standard of entries had been exceptional. “This year’s winning books demonstrate the irreducible power of the written word at a time of rapid global change and uncertainty,” said Australian novelist Nicholas Hasluck, who headed the judging panel. Now in its 25th year, the prize recognises the work of both established and up-and-coming authors, It has, in the past, been awarded to a host of literary luminaries, including Peter Carey, Andrea Levy, Vikram Seth, Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee.
Best Book Winner for The Memory of Love: Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow, Scotland and raised in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The Memory of Love, set in the aftermath of civil war, weaves together the lives of a dying man reflecting on his past life, a British psychologist, and a young surgeon. The judges praised the book for its risk-taking, elegance and breadth
Global: Many great writers have been awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize. How does it feel to join such illustrious company?
Aminatta Forna: I’m going to think more in terms of countries than in terms of writers. Sierra Leone has never won a major literary award and I think that, for me, is just the most important thing. People back home are going to be so excited. Our writers are struggling; they’re sweeping floors as part-time jobs, they’re working as secretaries and they’re writing in those few hours that they can find a week. So that’s what I’m taking from this – Sierra Leone has now won its first major literary prize.
What is the literary in scene in Sierra Leone like?
It is small but strong, small but vibrant. At the end of the war, I went out there in 2001-5 through the British Council and I held workshops for writers, prospective writers and poets. They now don’t need me, they meet every week, they read their work to each other. So it is a small but a determined literary scene.
What do you think you will gain from winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize?
I really hope – it’s what every writer hopes – that my book will be more widely read. I write for people, I write for readers, and so the more countries and the more people, the better.
Do you have a specific idea of who your audience is, who you are writing for?
I very carefully write for two worlds: those who know oppression and those who don’t; those who know Sierra Leone and those who don’t. I want each group to find something in the book. I know that people will read it on different levels but each level on which you read it should give you something.
The Memory of Love is set in the aftermath of the civil war in Sierra Leone and one of the central themes seems to be about healing. Why have you addressed this in your book and do you think that it is possible for individuals and for a nation to heal after such a traumatic event?
Yes. I think the human mind heals – absolutely. It would have been peculiar to leave it out since healing and recovery from war are two sides of the same coin. I feel that people do recover and must recover, but I think that what enables that recovery is a sense of hope – it’s the most important thing. Armies of social workers and psychologists going out are probably not the answer. The answer really is that people need to have a job, to have a functioning economy, to be able to marry and know that they can raise their children. It’s a matter of hope and actually I don’t think we need all these complicated solutions to trauma; we need to remember the simple ones.
Are you working on a new book at the moment?
Well… I’m a little bit superstitious about saying what it is, but yes, I’m working on a new novel and I’ll be excited to get back to it. It’s about the seeds of war again but it’s not set in Africa.
Is there something specific that draws you to war as a setting for your novels?
I think it’s my duty as a writer. I think it’s important for writers to tackle those subjects. Writing is for many things: it is for leisure and pleasure and joy; it is to escape. But it is also for understanding things and in my particular case, given the world that my family and friends come from and what happened there, that’s what I wanted to use my skills to do – to try to understand that.
Best First Book Winner for A Man Melting: Craig Cliff
From an imaginary friend with an identity crisis to the eponymous melting man whose body is leaking “pure H2O”, Craig Cliff’s 18 short stories are “truly insightful and amplify many of the absurdities around us, reflecting our own expectations, fears and paranoia on the big questions in life”, said the judges. Global spoke to him soon after he received the prize
Global: How does it feel to have won the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize?
Craig Cliff: I’m still very much in that shocked phase. There is a slight trickle of jubilation coming through but I feel that there might be a wave after a couple more glasses of wine.
A number of previous winners, Zadie Smith and Chimanda Nogozi Adichie among them, have gone on to great commercial and critical success. What do you think that winning the prize will mean for your literary career?
It’s amazing even to be considered in the same sentence as some of these writers. For me, it was a fantastic honour and a huge surprise to win for the South-East Asia and Pacific region. The biggest thing about this for me has been coming here to Sydney this week and breaking into the Australian market which, for a New Zealand author, is a huge thing, especially an unknown author of short stories.
So I hope some of the experiences I’ve had this week will be replicated in some other markets.
How difficult was it for you to get your book published?
I wrote two novels that didn’t get published prior to focusing quite intently on short stories. I have always written short stories as well but I followed the wisdom that it’s easier to get a novel published than a short story collection – I bear witness to the opposite of that. I had one short story published in an anthology with a bunch of other great New Zealand writers and that got my foot in the door with Random House New Zealand. I said [to them], “Would you be interested in seeing a collection of short stories?” and they said, “Yes”. They tempered my expectations around the potential for short stories in the market at present. I’m forever grateful for the risk they took on me.
Other than the fact that you didn’t manage to get your first novels published, what drew you to the short story form?
It is quite an investment of time and effort – time that could be spent outside with friends, playing cricket and drinking beer, but instead you’re at home writing a novel that some part of you knows won’t win the Booker Prize. So, after putting all this investment into novels and failing to get published, I turned to short stories – they are less work and if you are successful with one out of four stories you can get your name out there. So I really focused on short stories and as a result, I sort of fell in love with the form. It gets a bad rep. People always say to me: “I don’t really get short stories. They always seem to finish on the same downer ending.” So I set myself a challenge of stretching the form to include all sorts of emotions and all sorts of endings and all sorts of themes.
Your stories are very varied and seem to blend the outlandish with the everyday. Where do you draw your inspiration from?
Like a lot of writers I’m an avid notebook-keeper. I’m always looking out for a good story idea. Some of them have to sit there and ferment for a long time until I find that secondary idea that sets everything off. For example, take one of the stories in the collection called ‘Another Language’. When I was still at high school, I did one university course extra-murally and on one of the contact days everybody doing this course from across New Zealand got together. There was a whole bunch of interesting characters but one in particular stuck with me – a guy who had emigrated from Poland and he had quite a strong Polish accent and a very, very strong stutter, and I wondered if he stuttered in Polish as well as English and is that even possible?
So I wrote it down in my notebook and years passed because I didn’t know how to write it. Then one day it twigged that I could write it from the perspective of a young boy trying to find this out – in the story it’s his grandfather who is actually from the former Yugoslavia and he says he doesn’t stutter in English but he does in Serbian, which is why he emigrated. Choosing the perspective from which to tell the story just set everything off. To be honest, I wrote the first draft in about three hours in a slow afternoon at work. So things can happen quite quickly in terms of getting words on the page but it’s a long time fermenting.
Are you working on something at the moment? Another collection of short stories or a novel?
I am working on a novel. It’s a historical novel. I’m influenced, I guess, by what was in my collection and by wanting to do something different again. All the stories in A Man Melting are set in contemporary time and space and so I either wanted to set something in the future or the past. The past seems more of a challenge in a way and I really wanted to research something and partner it with the imagination.
What advice would you give to someone thinking about writing their very first book?
I would say: focus on short stories. You have this wonderful form where you can play around and experiment, and when things work – they might not work every time – you’ve got an avenue to get published and a way to build up your momentum and credentials.
I definitely think that there is a huge amount of interest in short stories and that the Internet and e-books are changing the way we think about short story collections – the same way that digital music has changed the way we think about albums. It’s an exciting time and short stories are fantastic.
