Wingate Prize 2010

First biography of a Palestinian Writer (in any language) scoops Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize 2010

MY HAPPINESS BEARS NO RELATION TO HAPPINESS: A POET’S LIFE IN THE PALESTINIAN CENTURY by Adina Hoffman (Yale University Press) has won the prize dubbed ‘the Jewish Booker’.

“This is an historic day for Jewish-Palestinian relations. The story of Palestine is the story of us all, ” said Editor of the Jewish Quarterly, Rachel Lasserson.

Commenting on the winning book Anne Karpf, chair of the judging panel, said:

“All four judges fell in love with this year’s winning book, ‘Adina Hoffman’s ‘My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness’. Hoffman’s eloquent and moving account of the life of Palestinian poet Taha Mohammed Ali, the first biography of a Palestinian writer in English, brilliantly recreates Palestinian life in the 1920s. In places it reads almost like a detective story as Hoffman painfully excavates the truth about how all traces of the Palestinian village of Saffuriya were erased and replaced by the Israeli village of Tzippori. But this is ultimately an uplifting book, combining meticulous research with literary sensitivity and a deep humanity: a beautifully written portrait of lived resistance. You read it and you marvel at human resilience and creativity.”

Former winners include Amos Oz, David Grossman, Zadie Smith, Imre Kertesz, Oliver Sacks, WG Sebald, Etgar Keret and Fred Wander.
 
This year’s judging panel was Robert Cassen, Joseph Finlay, Naomi Gryn and Anne Karpf.

So What?: New and Selected Poems by Taha Muhammad Ali (translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin) is published in the UK by Bloodaxe books

Notes to Editors

Established in 1977 by the late Harold Hyam Wingate, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize is now in its 31st year. The winner of the 2009 prize will receive £4,000.

Jewish and non-Jewish authors resident in the UK, British Commonwealth, Europe and Israel are eligible. Books submitted must be in English, either originally or in translation.

The Jewish Quarterly is the foremost Jewish literary and cultural journal in the English language. This year it celebrates 56 years of publication.

The Harold Hyam Wingate Charitable Foundation is a private grant-giving institution, established over forty years ago. In addition to supporting the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prizes, it has also organised and supported the Wingate Scholarships.

The Shortlist

The 2010 shortlist was:

The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck (Harvill Secker)

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness by Adina Hoffman (Yale UP)

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)

The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand (Verso)

The Judges

· Anne Karpf is a writer, sociologist and award-winning journalist who writes for The Guardian, broadcasts regularly on Radios 3 and 4, and teaches at London Metropolitan University. Her books include the family memoir The War After: Living with the Holocaust (recently republished by Faber Finds) and The Human Voice: The Story of a Remarkable Talent (Bloomsbury). She is co-editor of A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (Verso).

· Naomi Gryn is a writer, broadcaster and filmmaker. Television documentaries include The Sabbath Bride, Chasing Shadows, The Star, and The Castle & The Butterfly. A former chairman of Society of Authors’ Broadcasting Group, she has written and presented a number of radio documentaries for BBC, including A Strange Legacy (Radio 4), Next Year In Jerusalem (Radio 2), Inside The New Yorker (Radio 4), and The Jews of India (World Service). Naomi co-authored and edited her father’s (Rabbi Hugo Gryn) memoirs, Chasing Shadows for Viking/Penguin.

· Joseph Finlay is a composer, pianist and a grassroots Jewish activist. He has co-founded, or been closely involved in Wandering Jews, Jewdas, Moishe House London, and the Open Talmud Project.

· Robert Cassen OBE is Visiting Professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics. He was a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, and Director of Queen Elizabeth House and Professor of Development Economics at Oxford. He served on the staff of DfID, the British High Commission in New Delhi, the World Bank, and the Brandt Commission and is the author of India: Population, Economy, Society; of Does Aid Work? (with associates); 21st Century India: Population, Economy, Human Development and the Environment; with Tim Dyson and Leela Visaria, and Tackling Low Educational Achievement: a Report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation with Geeta Kingdon.

The Winning Book

MY HAPPINESS BEARS NO RELATION TO HAPPINESS

A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century by Adina Hoffman

This book tells the story of an exceptional man and the culture from which he emerged: Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He travelled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into what one leading American critic has dubbed “perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet alive today”.

As it places Muhammad Ali’s life in the context of the lives of his predecessors and peers, My Happiness offers a sweeping depiction of a charged and fateful epoch. It is a work that Arabic scholar Michael Sells describes as “among the five ‘must read’ books on the Israel-Palestine tragedy”. In an era when talk of the “Clash of Civilizations” dominates, this biography offers something else entirely: a view of the people and culture of the Middle East that is rich, nuanced, and above all else, deeply human.

Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, and, with Peter Cole, the forthcoming Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. She lives in Jerusalem.