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Rohinton Mistry wins Neustadt award from OU
Published: 10/4/2011 10:31 AM
Last Modified: 10/4/2011 10:31 AM


Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry, an Indian-Canadian author best known in this country for his novel "A Fine Balance," was named the winner of 22nd Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

The $50,000 award is co-sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, the literary journal World Literature Today and the Neustadt family.

The Neustadt Prize is sometimes called "the American Nobel," in that many of its recipients, nominees and judges have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz and Czeslaw Milosz.

It was also the first international literary award of this magnitude to originate in the United States, and one of the few for which novelists, poets and playwrights are equally eligible.

Mistry, a native of what is now Mumbai, Indian, immigrated to Canada in 1975. He earned degrees in mathematics, English and philosophy, and after working some years in the finance world began to devote himself to writing.

From the beginning of his writing career, Minstry has earned high praise and awards, including Canada's two major literary awards -- the Governor General's Award for "Such a Long Journey" and the Giller Prize for "A Fine Balance." Those two novels, as well as "Family Matters," were each shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

"A Fine Balance" was a selection of Oprah Winfrey's book club in 2001, which helped bring increased attention to Minstry's work sound of the Canadian border.

The juror who nominated Mistry for the Neustadt Prize, the Nepal-born author and short story writer Samrat Upadhyay, said Mistry "writes with great passion, and his body of work shows the most compassionate and astute observations of the human condition, making him one of the most exciting and important contemporary novelists writing in the English language."

Mistry will come to OU's Norman campus in the fall of 2012 to receive the award.


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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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