Beatty is first US author to win Booker Prize
LONDON:Paul Beatty became the first US author to win the Man Booker Prize -- the world’s most prestigious English-language literary award -- for his novel “The Sellout” on Tuesday.
The jury said the novel was a “shocking and unexpectedly funny” portrayal of his native Los Angeles, which employs satire to explore racial equality in a fictional neighbourhood.
“I can’t tell you guys how long a journey this has been for me,” the writer said as he received the award from Prince Charles’s wife Camilla.
“In his equally affectionate and bitterly ironic portrait of the city and its inhabitants, Paul Beatty dodges inherited views of race relations, solutions or assumptions,” the jury said.
The author “presents through his beguilingly honest and wellintentioned hero an innocent’s view of his corrupt world”.
They said that the book brings “the unendurable status quo of present day US race relations to an absurdist conclusion, taking political correctness and selfloathing hostage en route”.
“The Sellout” is Beatty’s fourth novel and earlier this year it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States. The Man Booker Prize has traditionally been won by writers from Commonwealth states, but was opened up to authors from other Englishspeaking countries including the United States in 2013.
The winner of the Man Booker receives £52,500, ($64,100, 59,000 euros), although the real prize is seen as the huge sales prompted the moment judges announce their decision.
The Man Booker was launched in 1969 and has awarded writers including Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch and Salman Rushdie.
It was only opened to non-Commonwealth authors from 2013 -- a decision that was highly controversial in Britain.