Two of my Dewey picks this year have just picked up prizes - one of them definitely more infamous than the other.
First, congratulations to Evie Wyld for winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature written by someone under 35. Her debut novel After the Fire, A Still Small Voice is a beautifully written story about three generations of Australian men all suffering from the effects of war, and how painful the road is to healing, not only for them but also their families. You can read more about Wyld and her novel here.
And then Jonathan Littell has just picked up the 2009 Bad Sex in Fiction Award for a passage in his novel The Kindly Ones, that reads in part, " I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg". Well, this book has also won tons of literary awards - what's a few questionable sentences in a 992 page novel that is in every other way a powerful and unforgettable read? The judges do note that this is the first novel in translation to garner this prize.
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