Mister Pip wins 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
Lloyd Jones has won Overall Best Book in this year’s prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ prize. Jones was awarded the £10,000 prize at the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica on Sunday 27 May. Mister Pip triumphed over acclaimed novels from Africa, Europe and South Asia, Canada and the Caribbean, including UK author Naeem Murr’s The Perfect Man. Lloyd Jones is the first New Zealand writer to win best book since Janet Frame in 1989.
‘This mesmerizing story shows how books can change lives
in utterly surprising ways.’ Nicholas Hasluck, chair of the judging panel.
Last year, the Prize was won by Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, also published by Text.
Lloyd Jones
Mister Pip
Paperback (C format) | ISBN: 9781921145575 | RRP: $29.95 | 256pp
About this book
WINNER OF THE 2007 COMMONWEALTH WRITERS’ PRIZE
You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.
After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s tropical island, only one white person stays behind. Mr Watts wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley. The kids call him Pop Eye. But there is no one else to teach them their lessons. Mr Watts begins to read aloud to the class from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr Dickens.
Soon Dickens’ hero Pip starts to come alive for Matilda. She writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun.
But Matilda is not the only one who believes in Pip. And, on an island at war, the power of the imagination can be a dangerously provocative thing.