International Booker: John Carey's speechifying

[Bekah]

I just listened and typed.   John Carey is so excellent!

http://webcast.georgetown.edu/events/20050218_manbooker.mov


Intros

CAREY:

...  Before I read out the judges list for this first new Man Booker 
International Prize I'd like to make a few comments about the prize 
and how the judges see it.

For us, the prime aim of the MBIP is to build bridges between 
cultures.  And we believe that it's never been more urgent or more 
needful to do that than  now.   What literature shows is the 
interconnectedness of cultures.  The practice of narrative, telling 
one another's stories.  seems to be a biological human need,  like 
food and respiration.

Story telling is universal.   It's one of the marks of our common 
humanity.  That's why a novel from Albania, say, can illuminate 
reality for a reader from Kansas or Katmandu, strange as that might 
otherwise seem.  But not only do we need stories, we need writers 
constantly to supply us with new stories, we need readers.  Writers 
need to be resurrected through new eyes.  And the role of literary 
prizes, as we see it, is to alert readers to writers they haven't yet 
encountered.

What we've been looking for, as judges, is simply and solely literary 
excellence.  We haven't set ourselves quotas, whether of geography or 
race or gender.  We haven't done that because to have  done so we 
believe would have resulted only in an artificial display of 
tokenism. And it would have betrayed our duty to readers.  Our duty 
to readers,  we think, is to say that these  books, or these writers, 
are wonderful and you should read them.  If you don't, you'll miss 
something important.   We're not trying to convert you to any 
political  or cultural agenda we're trying to enrich your lives.

Of the 18 writers on our list more than half don't write in English. 
They've had to be translated. And we want, as judges, to pay tribute 
to translators.  They bring different nations and different races to 
a common understanding far more effectively, we believe, than 
statesmen or diplomats or politicians.  Translators are culture's 
unsung heros and heroines.  We want to sing them.

And the judges think it's regrettable that publishers in the English 
speaking world don't make foreign literature more available in 
translation and, even when translations exist, allow them to get out 
of print.  In judging this prize  we have on several occasions,  had 
to disqualify writers whom we consider very important because their 
work is not, or is no longer,  generally available in translation as 
the rules of the Prize require that it should be.  And we hope that 
the advent of the MBIP will encourage publishers to reverse that 
trend.  Nothing the Prize achieves, we believe, could matter more.

When we first started work on this Prize we drew up a list of over 
200 writers from 43 countries whom we felt we must consider.  We had 
to reduce that number to 18.  Actually, the rules state that the 
judges list should be approximately 15,  but we simply couldn't bring 
ourselves to eliminate anyone else after an afternoon of slaughter.

(laughter)

Even as it is, we know we have excluded giants.  This is a 
competition of giants.  And we feel a little like Lilliput... er... 
like Gulliver,  in Gulliver's Travels when he's involved in Nag and 
is the size of the Liliputians and is having a look at the giants and 
is making his critical comments about them.  We have excluded, we 
know, several Nobel Prize Winners.  Our excuse of course,  is that 
we've trusted our own judgement,  as judges must.  We've tried not to 
be dazzled by fame or celebrity.  The rules instruct us to seek out 
literary achievement and we've done that and we've taken it that 
achievement can  mean either the work of a lifetime or possibly even 
the writing of a single great book that as we see it, changed the 
shape of literature.   So,  here are the 18 names on the judge's list 
in alphabetical order and including the country:

Margaret Atwood (Canada)

Saul Bellow (Canada)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia)

Gunter Grass (Germany)

Ismail Kadare (Albania)

Milan Kundera (Czech Republic)

Stanislaw Lem (Poland)

Doris Lessing (UK)

Ian McEwan (UK)

Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)

Tomas Eloy Martinez (Argentina)

Kenzaburo Oe (Japan)

Cynthia Ozick (US)

Philip Roth (US)

Muriel Spark (UK)

Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)

John Updike (US)

Abraham B Yehoshua (Israel)


You'll see, that list is drawn from 14 different countries.  And for 
us, those 18 writers combine uniqueness and universality and they 
remind us irresistibly of the joy of reading.   Thank you.
***********

Questions from the audience