BLUE MET
Joyce Carol Oates receives the International Literary Grand Prix
by Heather Leighton
22.04.2012
Perhaps the highlight of the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival is the International Literary Grand Prix, awarded to a very deserving Joyce Carol Oates at the Bibliothèque Nationale last night. The prolific writer, who began her career at the tender age of 26, has penned some 70 works, which include novels, short stories, essays, memoirs, plays and children’s fiction. She has also written under the pen names of Lauren Kelly and Rosamond Smith. In spite of her many literary achievements and her prominent professorship at Princeton University, Oates came across as affable, calm and poised, with many fine words for Canada, where she taught in the 1970s and founded the Ontario Review with her late husband.
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BOOKS
Ru, by Kim Thuy (trans Sheila Fischman), Random House
by Heather Leighton
10.04.2012
Recipient of several literary prizes, including the Governor General’s Award for Literature, Ru is the autobiography of Kim Thuy. Under the name of Nguyen An Tinh, the author recounts her story: from her childhood in a palatial Saigon home, which her family is later forced to share with the invading Communist forces, to the squalor of the Malaysian refugee camp where she and her family fled before coming to Canada by boat. Starting out in Granby, Quebec, in the late 1970s, her parents work in menial jobs so that their children may one day live their “American” dream. As an adult, the protagonist returns to her native Vietnam where she is told that she is too fat to be Vietnamese and is mistaken for both an escort and a Japanese tourist.
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