2015 has been a big year for Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma, with his “truly magnificent” debut novel being nominated for various big awards and included on a vast amount of “best of” lists.
The latest news regarding The Fishermen is that it has been shortlisted for the prestigious Guardian First Book Award, coming up against five other debut publications for the £10 000 (about R213 000) prize.
Obioma won the inaugural FT/OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Fiction Award for last month and was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and the 2015 Centre For Fiction First Novel Prize, among others. The Man Booker went to Marlon James in the end, while the Centre for Fiction winner will be announced on 8 December this year.
Here’s the shortlist for the 2015 Guardian First Book Award in full:
- Man v Nature by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)
- Physical by Andrew McMillan (Jonathan Cape)
- The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (One/Pushkin Press)
- Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (Faber)
- Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter (Faber)
- The Shore by Sara Taylor (William Heinemann)
The winner will be announced tonight and, naturally, we are holding thumbs for Obioma!
Related links:
The Guardian featured short extracts and introductions by the the authors to all the shortlisted works. Read what Obioma writes in and about The Fishermen:
Recently, I stumbled on a line in The Fishermen that seemed to have come directly out of memory rather than from the pages of the book: “Did you do this to your blood brother?” I could recall instances where, as a child, when something happened between my siblings and me, that same question was asked with a kind of urgency that lent unarguable potency to the idea that your brother or sister was so special and somewhat indispensable that to hurt him or her was to hurt oneself. The Fishermen is an exploration of this kind of tie, and what it is that can snap it, or destroy it.
I grew up with many siblings, and always knew that one day I would write a story about the experience. But, strangely, this novel is not about my experience, but was merely inspired by it. When they were children, two of my older brothers had the kind of sibling rivalry that ignited little fires of violence. But when I learned that, as men aged almost 30, they had become very close, I began to ponder on what can rip families apart, especially close-knit ones. At around the same time, I had been reading a book in which I had encountered a phrase that stuck out to me: “A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” So, I thought, can this be applied to just about any entity, such as a family?
Catherine Flood reflected on the process of narrowing down the list to come up with the finalists for the 2015 Guardian First Book Award:
There is something wonderfully expectant about a prize for a first book, particularly one that welcomes first-time writers regardless of genre, category, form or language.
The varied rollcall of past recipients (Yiyun Li, Jonathan Safran Foer, Petina Gappah, Zadie Smith, Dinaw Mengestu among them), and the Guardian first book award’s international status, makes the reading journey more of a quest than – as some book awards seem to be – a standard nod to likely candidates.
Alison Flood wrote a reflection on the shortlist. Read her article:
Announcing the shortlist, Guardian books editor Claire Armitstead said that McMillan’s poems had “totally disarmed” her. “As a middle-aged, heterosexual woman, I’d assumed they wouldn’t be for me, but I found them tender and sexy and entirely relatable,” said Armitstead. “They carried me straight back to my teenage infatuation with the work of Thom Gunn, another gay poet, who is one of McMillan’s touchstones for Physical.”
Book details
- The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
EAN: 9780992918248
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- Man V. Nature: Stories by Diane Cook
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EAN: 9780062333117
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- Physical by Andrew McMillan
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EAN: 978022410213
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- The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
EAN: 9780992918248
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- Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev
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EAN: 9781610396004
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- Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
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EAN: 9780571323760
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- The Shore by Sara Taylor
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EAN: 9780099591887
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