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Jennifer Egan takes Pulitzer prize
A Visit From the Goon Squad adds prestigious fiction award to haul of honours
Jennifer Egan at home in Brooklyn. Photograph: Henny Ray Abrams/AP
An experimental novel inspired by Proust and The Sopranos and featuring a chapter written entirely as a PowerPoint presentation has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Jennifer Egan's widely acclaimed novel A Visit From the Goon Squad beat books by Jonathan Dee and Chang-rae Lee to win the $10,000 (£6,000) award, the most prestigious in American writing.
Judges called Egan's novel "an inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed". The interlocking story, which has already won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, follows the lives of ageing punk rocker and music mogul Bennie Salazar and his young PA Sasha, moving from the 1970s to the near future, from New York and San Francisco to Naples and Africa.
Egan, who was longlisted for the Orange prize but missed out on the shortlist, told the Associated Press that A Visit From the Goon Squad was inspired by Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. "His book of time is all about how the work of time is unpredictable and in some sense unfathomable," she said. "So there's no question that winning a prize like this feel unpredictable and unfathomable."
Her Facebook page showed a less measured response: "Won the Pulitzer today!" she wrote, to a host of thumbs up. She joins a stellar line-up of former Pulitzer prize winners including Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, Alice Walker and William Faulkner.
The $10,000 poetry Pulitzer was taken by The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by America's former poet laureate Kay Ryan, "a body of work spanning 45 years, witty, rebellious and yet tender, a treasure trove of an iconoclastic and joyful mind," according to judges.
"It comes with a really big car, doesn't it? Don't you get a Humvee? The poet's car," Ryan joked to the AP, adding that "since my nature was not very compatible with the tastes of my time, I had to find ways to express what must be expressed in poetry, which is the activity of the mind and the heart."
"I suppose it sounds like a cliché, but poetry came and got me. I came to it very reluctantly, but it insisted," she said.
Siddhartha Mukherjee's "biography" of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, won the $10,000 non-fiction Pulitzer for, judges said, being "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science".
Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow won the biography award, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner took the history prize and Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris the Pulitzer for drama, all worth $10,000.
News from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ ... egan-pulitzer-prize |
