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Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman shortlisted for DSC Prize 2012
The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is a first-of-its-kind initiative as it is specifically focused on the richness and diversity of South Asian writing. The prize is also unique since it is not ethnicity driven in terms of the author's origin and is open to any author belonging to any part of the globe as long as the work is based on the South Asian region and its people. After intense deliberation over the longlist comprising 16 books, the eminent Jury, chaired by Ira Pande along with renowned literary figures Dr. Alastair Niven, Dr. Fakrul Alam, Faiza S. Khan, and Marie Brenner, selected the shortlist for this major international award. The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature has a prize value of $50,000 for the best writing about the South Asian region. The winner of the second DSC Prize for South Asian Literature will be announced at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival on January 21, 2012. The prize will be awarded for the best work of fiction pertaining to the South Asian region, published in English, including translations into English. The plot in Chinaman revolves around the quest of a retired sportswriter, W.G. Karunasena, who is dying. He spends his final months drinking arrack, upsetting his wife, ignoring his son, and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew, an elusive spin bowler he considers 'the greatest cricketer to walk the earth'. On his quest to find this unsung genius, W.G. uncovers a coach with six fingers, a secret bunker below a famous stadium, an LTTE warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket, and himself. Ambitious, playful, and strikingly original, Chinaman is a novel about cricket and Sri Lanka- and of Sri Lanka through its cricket. Hailed by the Gratiaen Prize judges as 'one of the most imaginative works of contemporary Sri Lankan fiction', it is an astounding book. Courtesy The Nation, November 6, 2011 CHINAMAN LONG LISTED FOR DSC PRIZE
It’s been a wonderful couple of years for Shehan. Subsequent to self-publishing his eclectic tale on cricket and much more in Sri Lanka, the novel has been published in India, England, and the US, and chosen as one of Waterstones’ top 11 debuts of 2011. Now Chinaman has been long listed for the DSC Prize 2012, worth $50,000, the winner to be announced at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2012. The long list is as follows :
The longlist was chosen from close to 60 entries received by the DSC Prize Secretariat earlier this year and reviewed over the past 3 months, by a five member jury comprisingDr. Alastair Niven, Dr. Fakrul Alam, Faiza S Khan, Ira Pande (Chair of the jury) and Marie Brenner. The Jury has assessed and identified these exemplary works of fiction that voice the dynamic and eclectic nature of the South Asian region and culture. Commenting on the Longlist and the jury experience, Chairperson of the Jury, Ira Pande said, “The longlist of the 2012 DSC Prize is an interesting mix of 16 titles chosen after a careful consideration of various styles, languages and subject matter. To my mind, it reflects the best of the South Asian literary tradition: a wide landscape of rural and urban life, intricate rituals of story-telling and an indication of its evolving form. This is the East, seen as it is by some of the most promising novelists of Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, and as it appears to those who live elsewhere” The Launch of Translations in to English of the Three Wheeler Press Publications
 Time for Chinaman
By Richard Boyle"Why, you ask, has no one heard of our nation's greatest cricketer? Here, in no particular order. Wrong place, wrong time, money and laziness. Politics, racism, power cuts and plain bad luck. If you are unwilling to follow me on the next God-knows-how many pages, re-read the last two sentences. They are as good a summary as I can give from this side of the bottle." – Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew Since the New Year, the judging of the entries and organisation of the shortlist and award events has coincided with the publication on the Subcontinent, and the preparations for further international publication in the UK and US, of a novel that won the Gratiaen Prize 2008, Shehan Karunatilaka's cricket saga, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. It was hailed by the judges as "one of the most imaginative works of contemporary Sri Lankan fiction". Michael Ondaatje, who prefers to remain as invisible as possible with regards the Trust and rarely comments on the novels that win the prize he founded, was moved to describe Chinaman as "a crazy ambidextrous delight". This is the first time in the history of the Gratiaen Prize that such international publication of a winning entry has occurred, although Carl Muller's The Jam Fruit Tree (co-winner 1993) was published by Penguin in India. The publishing history of Chinaman is complex considering its comparative youth. The entry was submitted in manuscript form to the Gratiaen Trust, and after winning the prize Shehan spent time in honing the text. The process took far longer than expected. "I was due to appear at the Galle Literary Festival in January 2010 and had nothing on the shelves," he told me. So "the best alternative", he believed, to rushing out an incomplete book, "was to publish a 30-page teaser booklet leading up to publication. It generated a bit of buzz and anticipation for the finished product." After a fruitless search to find a sympathetic agent or publisher, Shehan used the Gratiaen Prize money to self-publish the first edition in March 2010, and then left Sri Lanka to work in Singapore. Since its initial appearance in Sri Lanka, Chinaman has garnered some positive reviews, one of the most perceptive, I believe, being Richard Simon's "Liar's Cricket" (The Sunday Times, July 11, 2010). I wish to present some comments regarding the book rather than get bogged down in the plot, but Simon provides a necessary introduction: "Its plot concerns the efforts of one WG Karunasena, an alcoholic ex- sports journalist, to research and write the biography of Pradeep Mathew, a Tamil spin-bowling genius who played for Sri Lanka in numerous test and one-day international matches as well as for Thurstan College, Royal College and Bloomfield CC. Mathew, we are told, delivered spectacular performances in obscure games and more than once saved the day for his team and his country, but since the Nineties he has been somehow forgotten, lost to history. Even the few people who still remember him – old coaches, former teammates who never made the record-books, family members and an ex-girlfriend – don't want to talk. "Shehan Karunatilaka's novel Chinaman subsists – make that thrives – upon the wreckage produced by the collision of truth and fiction. It features among its characters a famous English cricketer-turned-commentator named Tony Botham and a Sri Lankan sports minister called Tyronne Cooray who had a stadium in Moratuwa named after him. "It is not perfect by any means, but it is by far the best novel ever written by a Sri Lankan who actually resides in his home country instead of merely visiting to attend literary festivals. "Until Chinaman, I had yet to read a Sri Lankan English novel that stayed good, or even palatable, to the last drop," Simon declares. "Some had arguable literary merits – a charming sense of time or place, real action and suspense, the odd felicitous turn of phrase or telling auctorial insight – but none of them were worth a damn as a story, one that kept you interested, that had a plot which stayed the course and characters anyone but the author could possibly care about. Not one of them, frankly, ever had a proper ending. Chinaman has that, and pretty much everything else it takes, too. The first genuine contender for the title of Great Sri Lankan Novel has entered the lists." Simon points out that Chinaman is much more than about cricket, that it is embedded in the realities of this island's life: "Sri Lankan it is with a vengeance. Its blend of fact and fiction closely resembles the made- up 'history' Sri Lankan children are taught in school. Its subject, cricket, is, of course, our national obsession, but in the background, Karunatilaka also touches, without ever making it look like a stretch, upon all the crucial Sri Lankan realities: racism, all-pervasive yet blandly denied; class snobbery; endemic corruption, moral failure and cultural decline; suicide-bombings, alcoholism, paedophile sex tourism; the shadow of the colonial past and the failures of the first post-Independence generation. It's a depressing list, but in spite of it, as we all know, Sri Lanka is a far from depressing country." Inevitably, the book drew attention on the cricket fanatics' website, CRICINFO. The review "Where in the world is Pradeep Mathew?" by Sidin Vadukut of October 16, 2010, informed online readers of its handsome stroke-play, although it included "a few hoicks over slip": "The mysteries of Pradeep Mathew, combined with the brutal dissection of cricket and the delicious morsels of cricketing trivia come together to form one of the strongest, most immersive plots in a sports novel, or indeed any novel, I have read in a long time. "The book is not without its gimmicks. There are a few towards the end that are particularly laboured. And there are a few occasions where the dialogues seem too smart by half. But all good innings have room for a few hoicks over slip. And Chinaman is a Test match-winning innings-at-the- death watch-over-and-over-on-YouTube kind of a book. sent the novel to the Publishing Director of Jonathan Cape in UK, Dan Franklin, described as "the colossus behind Britain's superstar authors". Franklin compares Chinaman to Midnight's Children, arguing that it does for Sri Lanka what Rushdie's novel did for India: "This makes it sound serious, but it's nothing of the sort. It's anarchic, verbally playful, incredibly funny, and most glorious of all, it's entirely one hundred percent about cricket and it doesn't matter one jot if you've never seen an over bowled." "The book comes out on April 28th in the UK and across other cricketing countries towards mid-year," Shehan enthuses. "And we've just sold the US rights." The novel has also been selected for Waterstone's 11 "Our pick of the best first novels of 2011" – among them Sarah Winman's When God was a Rabbit, Sam Leith's The Coincidence Engine, Sophie Hardach's The Registrar's Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English, Kevin Barry's City of Bohane, Amanda Hodgkinson's 22 Britannia Road, and Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator, the only other South Asian novel to make this list. Incidentally, the first chapter of Chinaman is available for download on Waterstone's website. The division between fact and fiction is deliberately blurred in Chinaman. Shehan has enhanced this aspect by creating a website "Pradeep Mathew's Amazing Deliveries" – 14 in all - with accompanying articles and diagrams, and the copyright in WG Karunasena's name! As we head towards another Gratiaen Prize, let's hope that this year other major literary talent will be revealed. (This article originally appeared in The Sunday Times, March 27, 2011) |
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Random House India recently announced the shortlisting of Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka for the DSC Prize 2012 for South Asian Literature. The shortlist was announced at a prestigious gala event at London's Globe Theatre where long-listed authors, publishers, London's literati, ambassadors from the South Asian region gathered together for the event.
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