American author wins prestigious Man Booker
George Saunders wins fiction prize for Lincoln in the Bardo
LONDON— American author George Saunders won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction Tuesday with Lincoln in the Bardo, a polyphonic symphony of a novel about restless souls adrift in the afterlife.
The book is based on a real visit U.S. president Abraham Lincoln made in 1862 to the body of his11-year-old son Willie in a Washington cemetery. It is narrated by a chorus of characters who are all dead, but unwilling or unable to let go of life.
It is the second year in a row an American has won the $83,000 Cdn prize, which was opened to U.S. authors in 2014.
By turns witty, bawdy, poetic and unsettling, Lincoln in the Bardo juxtaposes the real events of the U.S. Civil War — through passages from historians both real and fictional — with a chorus of otherworldly characters male and female, young and old. In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is the transition state between death and rebirth.
Saunders was awarded the prize by Prince Charles’s wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, during a ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall.
Accepting his trophy, Saunders said the book’s style may be complex, but the question he posed at its heart was simple: Do we respond to uncertain times with fear and division, “or do we take that ancient great leap of faith and try to respond with love?”
Baroness Lola Young, who chaired the Booker judging panel, said the novel “stood out because of its innovation, its very different styling, the way in which it paradoxically brought to life these almost-dead souls.”
Lincoln in the Bardois the first novel by the 58-year-old Saunders, an acclaimed short-story writer who won the Folio Prize in 2014 for his darkly funny story collection Tenth of December.
Aformer oil-industry engineer who teaches creative writing at Syracuse University in New York state, Saunders is probably best known outside literary circles for a commencement speech he gave in 2013 with the key message “Try to be kinder.” It went viral on the internet, became an animated cartoon and was published as a book.
He had been bookies’ favourite to win the Man Booker.