International
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2004
Judging Panel |
Anita
Desai
©
Robert Meech
The Independent
|
Anita
Desai was born in 1937. Her father was Bengali and her mother German,
and she was educated in Delhi. Her published works include Fire
on the Mountain (1977) for which she won the Royal Society of
Literature's Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the 1978 National Academy
of Letters Award, followed by a collection of short stories, Games
at Twilight (1978), Clear Light of Day (1980) which
was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize, In Custody (1984)
which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was made into a film
by Merchant Ivory, Baumgartner's Bombay (1988), and Journey
to Ithaca (1995). Anita is the author of two books for children,
The Peacock Garden (1979) and The Village By the
Sea (1982), which won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction
and was subsequently made into a film. Her latest novel, Fasting,
Feasting, was published in 1999 and shortlisted for the Booker
Prize, and was followed in 2000 by a collection of short stories, Diamond
Dust. Anita Desai is a member of the Advisory Board for English
of the National Assembly of Letters in Delhi and holds Fellowships at
the Royal Society of Literature in London, the American Academy of Arts
and Letters in New York and Girton College, Cambridge. She lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. |
Shirley
Geok-lin Lim
|
Shirley
Geok-Lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia,
in 1944 and has lived in the United States
of America since 1969. She completed her Ph.D. in British and American
Literature in Brandeis University in 1973. Her first collection of poems,
Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth
Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of poetry: No
Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon
History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work;
and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998). She is also
the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the
White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book
Award for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold, was
published in 2001. Her co-edited anthology, The Forbidden Stitch:
An Asian American Woman's Anthology received the 1990 American
Book Award. She has published two critical studies, Nationalism
and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines and Singapore
(1993) and Writing South East Asia in English: Against the
Grain (1994) and has edited / co-edited many volumes and two special
issues of journals. Her work has appeared in many journals and she is
the recipient of many honours. She is currently professor of English at
the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. |
Knut
Ødegård
|
Knut
Ødegård was born in Molde, Norway in 1945. He studied
theology and philology in Norway and England and was awarded a D. Litt
in 1999. His first volume of poetry, The Dreamer, The Wanderer and
The Well, was published in 1967, and since then he has published
twelve volumes of poetry, which have been translated into many languages,
the most recent being The Stephensen House (2003). He is
also the author of two novels, a play, non-fiction works and essays and
has translated ten volumes of poetry. He has been a literary critic in
Aftenposten, the leading newspaper of Norway, since 1968, a position
he still holds and is deeply involved in publishing and literary life
in both Norway and Iceland. In 1989, he was appointed a lifetime state
Scholar by the parliament of Norway. He is the holder of many awards and
distinctions, among them the Anders Jahre Cultural Prize, Norway's major
cultural distinction, awarded in 2001. He was knighted by the President
of Iceland in 1987 for services to literature and knighted by the King
of Norway in 1997 with the Royal Oder of Merit. |
John
Quinn
|
John
Quinn,
from Ballivor Co. Meath, recently retired from RTE Radio after a career
spanning twenty-five years, during which he won various awards in Ireland,
Tokyo and New York. He presented and produced 'The Open Mind' since
1989. Other programmes which he has presented and produced include 'This
Place Speaks to Me', 'My Education' (also published in book format),
'My Millennium', 'Is There Life After Work?' and various documentaries.
He is the author of four works of children's fiction, including The
Summer of Lily and Esmé, which won the Bisto Book of
the Year Award in 1992; Generations of the Moon (1995),
a novel; and the editor of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Girl (1996), My Education (1997) and The
Open Mind Guest Lectures (1999).His most recent work, Sea
of Love, Sea of Loss, a memoir, was published in 2003. He was
awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of Limerick, Ireland,
in February 2003.
|
|
Michèle
Roberts
|
Michèle
Roberts, half-English and half-French, was born in 1949. She is the
author of eleven novels: A Piece of the Night (1978), The
Visitation (1983), The Wild Girl (1984), The
Book of Mrs. Noah (1987), In the Red Kitchen (1990),
Daughters of the House (1992), Flesh and Blood
(1994), Impossible Saints (1997), Fair Exchange (1999),
The Looking Glass (2000) and, most recently, The Mistressclass
(2003). She has also published short story collections, During Mother's
Absence (1993) and Playing Sardines (2003), three
books of poetry including All the Selves I Was: Selected Poems 1986-1994
(1995), and a book of essays, On Food, Sex and God: On Inspiration
and Writing (1998). Daughters of the House was shortlisted
for the 1992 Booker Prize and won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1993. She
is a regular book reviewer and broadcaster, and teaches the creative writing
programme at the University of East Anglia. In December 2001 she was appointed
Chevalier de l'Order des Arts at des Lettres by the French Government. A
staunch republican, she refused an OBE in 2003. |
Eugene
Sullivan
|
Eugene
R. Sullivan, non-voting Chair of the judging panel, is a former judge
of the U.S. federal court system. He has sixteen years appellate experience
and currently heads up a consultancy group providing strategic advice
on corporate and legal issues. |
