DORIS LESSING
Doris Lessing was born in Persia to British parents in 1919. She spent her childhood on her father’s farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia. She arrived in England in 1949, when her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published. Doris Lessing has travelled or lived briefly in France, Italy, Spain, Russia and Czechoslovakia. Her books have been translated into many languages from French to Russian.
Lessing’s collection of short novels called Five earned her the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954 and her play Play with a Tiger was presented in the West End in 1962. In 1982 she received the Austrian State Prize for Literature and the Shakespeare Prize, Hamburg. Doris Lessing has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times: Briefing For a Descent in to Hell(1971), The Sirian Experiments(1981) and The Good Terrorist(1985) which also won the WH Smith Award in 1985.
In August 1991, she received an honorary title of Distinguished Fellow in Literature in the School of English and American Studies conferred by University of East Anglia.
Doris Lessing lives in the UK
IAN McEWAN
Ian McEwan was born on 21 June, 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England. He spent much of his childhood in the Far East, Germany and North Africa where his father, an officer in the army, was posted. He read English at Sussex University and, after graduating, became the first student on the MA Creative Writing course established at the University of East Anglia by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.
He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded a CBE in 2000. He currently lives in London.
McEwan won the Somerset Maugham Award for First Love, Last Rites and the Booker Prize for Fiction with Amsterdam in 1998.
Ian McEwan lives in the UK
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
Born in Cairo in 1911, Naguib Mahfouz began writing when he was seventeen. His first novel was published in 1939 and ten more were written before the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952, when he stopped writing for several years. The appearance of the Cairo Triology, (Between-the-Palaces, Palace of Longing, Sugarhouse) in 1957 made him famous throughout the Arab world as a depictor of traditional urban life.
Until 1972, Mahfouz was employed as a civil servant, first in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, as Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and, finally, as consultant on Cultural Affairs to the Ministry of Culture. Now retired, he is now the author of no fewer than thirty novels, more than a hundred short stories, and more than two hundred articles. Half of his novels have been made into films which have circulated throughout the Arabic-speaking world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
What a fine list of novelists - one notes the absence of Salman Rushdie.
Finalists I think, will be:
Saul Bellow
Gunther Grass
Doris Lessing
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
John Updike,
For the winner, I propose Senor Marquez
Beautiful book covers, Eric
2 - Rodney Welch
So the Booker people pony up cash for one more useless literary award, a lifetime achievement honor to one of a host of usual suspects. Who cares?
3 - Aaman
Actually the money will come from the Man group, one of the largest hedge-fund outfits around. These awards are no more 'booker' than a hooker.
I guess this will become a second-chance Nobel Prize
4 - Eric Olsen
I would say the legitimacy of something like this is taht for most people on earth, the "usual suspects" are hardly household names, even if some are in many quarters, and anything that draws attention to fine literature for the general public can only be a good and worthwhile thing. Just putting this together, I kept saying "Damn, I should read more of these people."
5 - Rodney Welch
"Most people on earth" don't care and prizes like this aren't going to make them care -- which is fine; there's no reason they should. All awards are just p.r., more than anything; this one is superfluous besides.
6 - Eric Olsen
but some are influenced and educated by them and that is their value. PR isn't a bad thing, per se.
7 - Rodney Welch
Well fine -- let's have a "Best Male Writer Past the Age of 60" Award. A "Best Living Female Author Award." A "Best Young Female Writer With the Nicest Can" award. A "Best Novel Sold to Hollywood" award. A "Best Novel That Will Never Be Sold to Hollywood" award. A "Best Non-Fiction Asian Writer Living in America" award. A"Best Writer Who Has Never Been in My Kitchen" award. Then we can all just sit back as people throw out their video games and disconnect their TiVO's and pour into a headlong mad rush to the local B&N, tumbling ass over elbows to get to a classic re-issue of "Henderson the Rain King." Then they'll all go home, read to page 4, put it on their shelf, talk about how great it is at cocktail parties, and we can all be thankful for the enormous boost in literacy. Yeah right.
8 - Eric Olsen
that was a bit cynical, don't you think Rodney? I vote for the "Best Young Female Writer With the Nicest Can" award.
9 - Maggie Cohen
I vote for A.B.Yehoshua,for the impact of his work.