Akil Kumarasamy has won the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut story collection, Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The $30,000 prize, for "a promising emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application," includes an appointment as writer in residence at Bard College for one semester, without the expectation that he or she teach traditional courses. The recipient gives at least one public lecture and meets informally with students.
The Bard Fiction Prize committee called Half Gods "a breathtaking debut by one of those rare writers whose compassionate understanding--in this case, a multigenerational family with a frayed, crazy-quilt history--is matched by the narrative gifts necessary to bring her tales to life. While each individual story in this inventive collection is told in vivid, lusciously worded, image-rich prose, the overarching symphonic whole has--much like Jamaica Kincaid's first book, At the Bottom of the River--the sweep and scope of a novel. What Kumarasamy has given us with Half Gods is ultimately a meditation, as most great stories are, on time, memory, and hope for the future."
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Camilla Townsend won the $75,000 Cundill History Prize, which is administered by McGill University to recognize "the book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal," for Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford University Press USA).
Chair of the jury, Peter Frankopan called Fifth Sun "a work of breath-taking originality, accomplishment and importance. Camilla Townsend revolutionizes how we should look at Aztec society before, during and after the arrival of Europeans in Central America. After more than five hundred years, we are finally able to see history through the eyes of the indigenous people themselves rather than those of their conquerors. Not many books completely transform how we look at the past. This is one of those that does."
Also praising the winning title were jurors Lyse Doucet ("a magical book, the kind where you find yourself pausing on pages to absorb the beauty of words and imagery"), Eliga Gould ("history at its very best, a landmark in the field") and Sujit Sivasundaram ("richly evocative and deeply humane").
The two runners-up are Vincent Brown for Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War and William Dalrymple for The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East-India Company. Each receives a Recognition of Excellence Award and $10,000.