Red Tentacle prize for 'progressive, intelligent and entertaining' fiction goes to A Tale for the Time Being
'I've always wanted a tentacle of my own' … Ruth Ozeki. Photograph: Kris Krug
Ruth Ozeki lost out on the Man Booker prize to Eleanor Catton, but the author will be able to console herself with the fact that her novel A Tale for the Time Being has been named the most "progressive, intelligent and entertaining" book of last year by the Kitschies.
Ozeki won the Kitschies Red Tentacle prize on Wednesday night for her story weaving together the lives of a schoolgirl, a writer, and a zen-anarchist nun. The prize is for novels containing "elements of the speculative and fantastic", with Ozeki seeing off competition from Thomas Pynchon, Anne Carson, Patrick Ness and James Smythe to win.
"The Kitschies don't promise the best of a given year; they promise the year's most progressive, entertaining, and intelligent books with elements of the speculative," said judge, author and former winner Nick Harkaway. "There's a coherence about this year's finalists – a sense of fragmentation and re-creation, of alternative possibilities and the non-linear experience of time. I think one of the many positives of speculative writing is that it sneaks up on us and shows us our world, our concerns, and some kind of image of the bones beneath the skin."
Harkaway said that A Tale for the Time Being was about "time and parallel worlds, both in the human and the speculative sense, and about the deep conflicts in Japanese culture and, of course, how they reflect on our own".
Ozeki wins £1,000, a hand-crafted trophy of a tentacle and a bottle of Kraken rum. The novelist said she had "always wanted a tentacle of my own", adding that the Kitschies had "the nicest literary prize description I've ever seen, and I'm so proud to have won it".
"My tentacle will go on the wall next to my wooden cow head, my benthic anglerfish and my inflatable rhinoceros beetle," she wrote on Twitter.
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Ozeki won the Kitschies Red Tentacle prize on Wednesday night for her story weaving together the lives of a schoolgirl, a writer, and a zen-anarchist nun. The prize is for novels containing "elements of the speculative and fantastic", with Ozeki seeing off competition from Thomas Pynchon, Anne Carson, Patrick Ness and James Smythe to win.
"The Kitschies don't promise the best of a given year; they promise the year's most progressive, entertaining, and intelligent books with elements of the speculative," said judge, author and former winner Nick Harkaway. "There's a coherence about this year's finalists – a sense of fragmentation and re-creation, of alternative possibilities and the non-linear experience of time. I think one of the many positives of speculative writing is that it sneaks up on us and shows us our world, our concerns, and some kind of image of the bones beneath the skin."
Harkaway said that A Tale for the Time Being was about "time and parallel worlds, both in the human and the speculative sense, and about the deep conflicts in Japanese culture and, of course, how they reflect on our own".
Ozeki wins £1,000, a hand-crafted trophy of a tentacle and a bottle of Kraken rum. The novelist said she had "always wanted a tentacle of my own", adding that the Kitschies had "the nicest literary prize description I've ever seen, and I'm so proud to have won it".
"My tentacle will go on the wall next to my wooden cow head, my benthic anglerfish and my inflatable rhinoceros beetle," she wrote on Twitter.
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