Candadian Wins Book Prize
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Lawrence Hill won the top Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for “The Book of Negroes,” a novel about a West African girl sold into slavery in 18th-century South Carolina who eventually returns home.
The Canadian author received a $19,600 check for the Overall Best Book Award from South African Minister of Arts and Culture Z. Pallo Jordan in a ceremony at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in South Africa, the contest organizers said in an e-mailed press release.
Tahmima Anam of Bangladesh won the Overall Best First Book prize for “A Golden Age,” a fictionalized account of her country’s war for independence in 1971.
Hill’s “The Book of Negroes” is written in the voice of an 18th-century West African named Aminata Diallo who is abducted from her village as an 11-year-old girl, becomes a slave in South Carolina, wins her freedom during the American Revolutionary War, and finds her way back to Sierra Leone. The book has been published in America under the title “Someone Knows My Name.”
Held each year by the intergovernmental Commonwealth Foundation, which is based in London, the contest aims to reward the best fiction written in English in the 53-member Commonwealth.
