Kiran Desai Wins Booker Prize

Seems like us brown people are popular these days on the author circuit....the most recent example being Kiran Desai, who has just won the extremely prestigious Man Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. And if you read it for no other reason, the cover is a beautiful blue!

Here is an excerpt from a CBC article:

“In India, the Booker is really followed by the media,” she says. “After I won, the press called my family there for their reaction. All my old aunties ran at high speed to the phone, so happy to say embarrassing things about me, like ‘Kiran was never a bright student, but she once cooked me a very nice meal.’”

See the rest of the CBC article here.

Read the Bold Type interview here.

Read the Refiff interview here.

Toronto Book Award Winner - Dionne Brand

Congrats go out to Dionne Brand, the winner of the Toronto Book Award! The judges noted that Brand managed to make Toronto itself a main character in the story.

Learn more here.

Read my post from a few months back on why you have to read this book here.

What We All Long For

No, this post isn't about sex (well, not directly), its about the book What We All Long For by Dionne Brand. This is, without hyperbole, the best book I've read in a long time for four reasons:

1. Books set in Toronto are great, as us Torontonians can really relate a lot more to someone talking about something happening in Kensington Market, as opposed to Time Square or something.
2. If, like me, you were born and raised in and around Toronto and are the child of visible minority immigrants, this book is for you. The rest of you will still enjoy it, but it won't have the personal tang that it does for those in my category. Honest. Proper.
3. I always admire writers that can create meaningful dialogue between characters in slang, which is something that I can never accomplish in my writing.
4. Always good to read something from a black-feminist-lesbian-Trinidadian author.

Stop reading about it and go buy it now at one of your friendly neighbourhood book retailers like Book City or Pages or Another Story Bookshop or the Toronto Women's Bookstore or A Different Booklist.