Cynthia Ozick lives in America
PHILIP ROTH
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, the son of an insurance salesman and the grandchild of European Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Bucknell University and the University of Chicago. After spending a year in the army, Roth began publishing short stories in 1956.
His first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) won the National Book Award, and since then he has published twenty-two books. In the 1990s, Roth won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), and the National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater (1995).
American Pastoral (1997) and I Married A Communist (1998), the first two volumes of the American trilogy that culminates in The Human Stain, received the Pulitzer Prize and the Ambassador Book Award respectively. The Human Stain was a PEN/Faulkner Award Winner, a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a Voice Literary Supplement, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angles Times Best Book. Philip Roth also received the Jewish Book Council Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement.
For many years, Roth taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He now lives and writes in Connecticut.
Philip Roth lives in America
MURIEL SPARK
Muriel Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918 to a Jewish Lithuanian father and an English Protestant mother. She was educated at the Edinburgh James Gillespie's School for Girls. After leaving school, Spark took a course in précis writing at the Heriott Watt College in Edinburgh.
In 1937 Muriel Camberg married Sydney Oswald Spark and they had a son, Samuel. For several years of her marriage Spark lived in Central Africa.
During the Second World War, Spark was conscripted to the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office where she worked as a propagandist for the war effort. After the war she lived in London, where she began her literary career. She edited The Poetry Review from1947-9 and wrote studies of Mary Shelley, John Masefield and the Bronte sisters. In 1952 she published her first book, a collection of poetry entitled The Fanfarlo and Other Verse but it was her winning of the Observer prize for short fiction that finally inspired her to write fiction full-time. Her first published novel, The Comforters was written three years after Spark converted to Roman Catholicism and the novel was inspired by her studies on the Book of Job.
In 1967 Spark took up residence in Italy where she now resides, moving between Rome and New York. In 1971 she was awarded an honorary degree in literature from Strathclyde University and has been similarly honoured by the Universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews, Edinburgh and Oxford. Heriot Watt also attributed her as a Doctor of the University. In 1993 Spark was made a Dame of the British Empire and in 1997 she received the David Cohen British Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement.
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.