'Independent' Foreign Fiction Prize won by Angolan writer
Wednesday, 2 May 2007
Print
Email
Britain's most valuable honour for literature in translation, The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, has been won by the Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa.
At the National Portrait Gallery in London yesterday evening, he collected the award for his sixth novel, The Book of Chameleons, published by Arcadia. The prize of £10,000, supported by Arts Council England and Champagne Taittinger, is divided equally between the author and his translator from the Portuguese version, Daniel Hahn. Agualusa is the first African-born winner of The Independent prize.
The novel mixes comedy, tragedy and touches of fantasy as it explores the recent history of the former Portuguese colony, whose independence in 1975 was followed by more than 20 years of bloody civil war.
Its hero, an albino African called Felix Ventura, works as a "genealogist" who fabricates a "better past" for ambitious clients haunted by previous traumas. He shares his adventures, memories and dreams with the novel's narrator: a gecko who observes the action from the walls of Felix's house.
David Constantine, the Oxford University-based poet, translator and critic, who was one of this year's judges, described The Book of Chameleons as "a beautiful fiction. It has grace, agility, wit, a lovely inventiveness. And - a vital factor - the translation by Daniel Hahn is well-spoken too. It gives pleasure".
Reviewing the book for The Independent, Amanda Hopkinson - director of the British Centre for Literary Translation in Norwich - called it "a morality tale for the truth commissions of our times", and "a work of fierce originality, vindicating the power of creativity to transform even the most sinister acts".
Agualusa was born in Huambo in 1960, studied agriculture and forestry, and now divides his time between Lisbon and the Angolan capital, Luanda. In addition to writing fiction and poetry, he has worked as a journalist, lived in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1990s, and published a book about Lisbon's black communities: Lisboa Africana.
A champion of African music, he has also produced radio programmes in Lisbon. His 1997 novel Creole - also published in the UK by Arcadia - won Portugal's Grand Prize for Literature for its ocean-crossing romance set among the mixed Portuguese-speaking peoples who emerged from the era of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic.
Among his inspirations, Agualusa cites not only Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges but (less predictably, perhaps) the teller of tall traveller's tales, Bruce Chatwin.
The Book of Chameleons competed against a shortlist that also included Dag Solstad's novel Shyness and Dignity from Norway (published by Harvill Secker); Eva Menasse's Vienna from Austria (Weidenfeld & Nicolson); Javier Marías's Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream from Spain (Chatto & Windus); Vangelis Hatziyannidis's Four Walls from Greece (Marion Boyars); and Per Olov Enquist's The Story of Blanche and Marie from Sweden (Harvill Secker).
The prize is only open to living authors, but this year the judges - Ali Smith, Kate Griffin, Jennie Erdal, David Constantine and Boyd Tonkin - decided to give a special commendation to Irène Némirovsky's best-selling epic of the fall of France, Suite Française (translated by Sandra Smith for Chatto & Windus). The manuscript was only discovered, in a suitcase, almost 60 years after its author was murdered in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz in late 1942.
