Krasznahorkai edged out Amitav Ghosh, eight others to bag the award
London : Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai has won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker International prize for his achievement in fiction as he edged out India’s Amitav Ghosh and eight others to bag the top literary award.
Chair of judges Marina Warner, an academic and writer, compared Krasznahorkai’s work to Franz Kafka — Krasznahorkai’s own personal literary hero — and Beckett. “I feel we’ve encountered here someone of that order,” she said while announcing the winner.
“That’s a trick that the best writers pull off; they give you the thrill of the strange…then after a while they imaginatively retune you. So now we say, ‘it’s just like being in a Kafka story’; I believe that soon we will say it’s like being in a Krasznahorkai story,” she said lauding his work.
Krasznahorkai, 61, in his acceptance speech at a ceremony in the Victoria and Albert Museum, credited Kafka, singer Jimi Hendrix and the city of Kyoto in Japan for inspiration.
The biennial Man Booker International prize is worth 60,000 pounds and is intended to honour a living author for his or her body of work, either written in English or available in English translation. The award can be won only once in an author’s lifetime.
Krasznahorkai was one of 10 writers shortlisted for this year’s award, alongside authors including Ghosh, Libya’s Ibrahim al-Koni, Mozambique’s Mia Couto and America’s Fanny Howe.
Kolkata-born, 58-year-old Ghosh had also missed out on the prize in 2008 when he was shortlisted for his work ‘Sea of Poppies’. “We really would have preferred not to have to choose a winner — every one of the 10 writers is really remarkable in different ways and there really isn’t any of them who doesn’t reward reading, who couldn’t have won the prize,” Warner said.
H S Rao
