Book News
O'Connor winner on First Book longlist
Friday 25 August 2006
Li, who lives in California with her husband and their two sons, has won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the California Book Award for first fiction with this book.
It was also nominated for the Orange Award for New Writers and the Kiriyama Prize.
The other nine competitors for the £10,000 prize include authors from Libya, Wales, Australia and Yorkshire.
The judges are Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of the South Bank centre; Irish writer and playwright Joseph O'Connor; authors Pankaj Mishra and Rose Tremain; commentator and broadcaster Greg Dyke; Guardian editors Claire Armitstead and Katharine Viner; and Stuart Broom of Waterstone's.
Judge Claire Armitstead said: "Every year seems to have a distinct personality and this year's seems to be a tremendous intellectual confidence and return to the first principles of literary quality. There were enough first-class biographies alone to fill half the longlist."
"Fiction was also very strong this year, with a lot of young writers facing up to big, contemporary stories with wit and warmth."
The shortlist for the award, which aims to recognise and reward new writing across fiction and non-fiction, will be announced in November and the winner in December.
The longlisted books:
Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany (Picador)
Harbor by Lorraine Adams (Portobello)
John Donne: The Reformed Soul by John Stubbs (Viking)
Lonesome George: The Lives and Loves of a Conservation Icon by Henry Nicholls (Palgrave Macmillan)
A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveller by Jason Roberts (Simon & Schuster)
Running for the Hills by Horatio Clare (John Murray)
Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan (Bloomsbury)
Waiting for the Night-Rowers by Roger Moulson (Enitharmon)
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li (4th Estate)
In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar (Viking)
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