By IANS
London : Indian origin journalist-writer Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s award-winning book on US hostilities in Iraq has been shortlisted for this year’s Guardian First Book award worth 10,000 pounds.
The shortlist includes Tahnima Anam’s “A Golden Age’ about the birth of modern-day Bangladesh.
Chandrasekaran’s book is titled “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone”. The book has already scooped this year’s Samuel Johnson prize. Chair of judges Lady Helena Kennedy described the book as “up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years”.
In all, five books have been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award: three novels, a biography and a work of non-fiction, according to The Guardian.
Other books include Catherine O’Flynn’s “What Was Lost”, which is part mystery, part dissection of modern consumer society, Dinaw Mengestu’s depiction of an Ethiopian immigrant’s quest for a fully realised life in “America, Children of the Revolution”, and Rosemary Hill’s biography of the architect and originator of the Gothic revival, “Augustus Pugin”.
The Guardian First Book Award is considered unique among book prizes as it is open to all first-time authors and because of the input of readers’ groups. The Guardian said that this year was a very strong year for first-time authors.
Claire Armitstead, the Guardian’s literary editor, said there was an extraordinary strength and diversity on the shortlist. “In the age of mass-market retailing, it is wonderful that the biography of a 19th-century architect could be right up there,” she said.
Armitstead is joined on the panel this year by the novelists Kamila Shamsie and Maggie O’Farrell, presenter Mariella Frostrup, journalist and author Simon Jenkins, Phillippe Sands QC and the Guardian’s features editor, Katharine Viner. The prize will be announced in December.