CK Stead's prizewinning receives backlash

New Zealand writer CK Stead, who in March won the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for his story "Last Season's Man," has been attacked by NZ novelist Keri Hulme, UK satire magazine Private Eye, several blogs, and the widow and literary executor of novelist Nigel Cox, who all see his prize-winning story as a thinly veiled insult against Cox, who died of cancer in 2006.

Cox, whose novels have won the Bucklands Memorial Literary Prize and the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship and have been repeatedly runners-up for the Montana New Zealand Book Award, criticized Stead's writing in the literary magazine Quote Unquote in 1994. In 2007, the critique was republished online, leading Stead to successfully solicit its removal.

"Last Season's Man" tells of a Croatian dramatist who is dismissed as a "has been" in a critique published by a competing writer. When the writer dies, the insulted dramatist woos his widow and reestablishes his fame and glory. Those familiar with the Quote Unquote controversy have drawn parallels between Stead's own literary rivalries and those of his character, seeing the story has a twisted revenge fantasy, with Cox's widow saying that she is "shocked" and his executor insisting that the story is "sickening." Keri Hulme, who won the Booker Prize for The Bone People in 1985, has called the story "fucking tame, timid, awful insofar as the writing is concerned, and vicious in the revealed background."

Stead, who is 77 and has been publishing since 1964, has nonchalantly dismissed all criticisms while rebuking his naysayers, insisting that the story is pure fiction and the ignorant misinterpretations of others are no fault of his own.

"Lost Booker" will honor best work from missing year, 1970

In 1971, in an effort to increase the timeliness of the award, the Man Booker Prize rules committee adjusted its pool of eligible nominees to include contenders only from the current publication year. Since its inception only a few years prior, the award had recognized books published in the previous year.

As a result of the nomination shuffle, the books published in 1970 were never eligible for the prestigious prize. Almost forty years later, the Man Booker Prize will bestow a special "Lost Booker" upon one of six contenders who would have likely been nominated that year: Patrick White (Australia) for The Vivesector, Shirley Hazzard (GB/US/Australia) for The Bay of Noon, Muriel Spark (Scotland) for The Driver's Seat, Mary Renault (GB) for Fire From Heaven, Nina Bawden (GB) for The Birds on the Trees, and J.G. Farrell (GB) for Trouble. Only Bawden and Hazzard are still alive.

A popular vote through April 23 on the Man Booker website will determine the winner, who will be announced on May 19.

CK Stead wins Sunday Times literary prize

The newly established Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story award has bestowed its first prize on CK Stead of New Zealand for his story "Last Season's Man," a tale of intellectual ego in Croatia.

The award carries a cash prize of 25,000 pounds, and six shortlisted stories including the winner (taken from a pool of 1,152 submissions) will be published in The Sunday Times Magazine.

Judges for the award include Hanif Kureishi, A.S. Byatt, and Nick Hornby. Kureishi called "Last Season's Man" "a fine example of how a short story should be constructed and written," according to an interview on Stuff.

Christian Karlson Stead, who was born in 1932, has published over thirty books since 1964, works which include novels, poetry collections, and essays on literary criticism in addition to short stories. Stead was commended by the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2005. In the same year he was a finalist for the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize for his novel Mansfield, a fictionalized account of New Zealand short story author Katherine Mansfield's struggles to become an established writer during the first World War.

Tim Winton wins Miles Franklin Literary Award

An award recognizing the best Australian book or play has been given, for a record-breaking fourth time, to novelist Tim Winton for his short novel Breath, which is set amidst a surfing community in Western Australia.

Catherine Schine of the New York Review of Books has called Tim Winton "a practitioner of what might be called the school of Macho Romanticism, or perhaps better, Heroic Sensitivity," and he has been compared to Hemingway, Mann, and McEwan. His previous novels Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1992), and Dirt Music (2002) have also won Miles Franklin Awards, and Cloudstreet--about two working class families living together from 1943-1963--is considered by many Australians a favorite book.

Winton's The Riders (1995) and Dirt Music were also shortlisted for Man Booker Prizes.