No money at Commonwealth party

by blogger Susan Wyndham in today's Sydney Morning Herald

There was a party at Customs House in Sydney last week for Steven Carroll and Karen Foxlee, the Australian winners of the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best book and best first book in South-East Asia and the South Pacific. The only problem was that Chris Prentice, the New Zealand academic who chaired the judges, was stuck in Auckland after her plane failed to take off, so the writers left without their £1000 ($2170) cheques.

Carroll won for his sixth novel, The Time We Have Taken, and Foxlee won for The Anatomy Of Wings. They now know the names of the other regional winners they are up against for the overall prizes for best book and best first book, worth £10,000 and £5000 respectively. In Africa they are Karen King-Aribisala (Nigeria) for The Hangman's Game and Sade Adeniran (Nigeria) for Imagine This. In Canada and the Caribbean, Lawrence Hill (Canada) for The Book Of Negroes and C. S. Richardson (Canada) for The End Of The Alphabet. In Europe and South Asia, Indra Sinha (India) for Animal's People and Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh) for A Golden Age.