COMMONWEALTH WRITERS' PRIZE: JUDGES
Guest blogger Annie Boyd on level five of the Aotea CentreThis was an hour long free session and I must admit I had thought to m
yself beforehand that it might be a little dull, hearing why a panel of judges had chosen two books to win this years Best First Book (right) and Best Book (left) in the Commonwealth. 
How wrong I was! It was absolutely fascinating from beginning to end.
yself beforehand that it might be a little dull, hearing why a panel of judges had chosen two books to win this years Best First Book (right) and Best Book (left) in the Commonwealth. 
How wrong I was! It was absolutely fascinating from beginning to end.
The four regional judges from Africa, Australia, Jamaica, and India were stars,(along with their Chair from Western Australia), giving incredible insights into the judging process and the difficulties of finding winners from a hotly debated, carefully considered, stimulating, wonderfully varied array of shortlisted books.
Their profound knowledge of these books was impressive and their articulate deliveries gave me huge confidence that the debate would have been challenging, provocative, and fierce!
The message I took away was that the world is a much better place with the sharing of literacies when we begin to know the richness and diversity of writers around the world, rather than merely focus on our own, that stunning writers can be found and nurtured and rewarded by prizes such as these, and that ultimately, the judging process itself, though incredibly difficult and time consuming, brings huge personal rewards!
The judges on stage were Anne Brewster (Australia), Michael Bucknor (Jamaica), Makarand Paranjape (India), Elinor Sisulu (South Africa) and Chair Nicholas Hasluck, pic left, (Australia).
The session was chaired by Graham Beattie.
2 comments:
Graham Beattie has been generous in his praise of various Chairs in action over the past few days so I must say that he did a grand job with this session. He allowed it to develop into a conversation and I was intrigued and enchanted by the different voices and accents. I thought also he was wise in letting this conversation flow through to the end of the time rather than breaking it up by inviting questions from the hundred or so of us in the audience.
And I agree with Annie Boyd about the confidence one felt when listening to the judges talk in such depth about all of the shortlisted titles. It is clearly a rigorous process. I had no idea previously about how these decisions were reached and I went away feeling confident about their choices, and in fact went and bought both books. May I say thanks too to those people who ran the wonderful Festival bookshop, they seemed to be there day and night. I hope it was worth there while.
I agree with everything Michael B says here, and also Annie Boyd was right on the money with her comments. An unexpectedly superb session. Thanks to eveyone on that platform. It was an eye opener for me.
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