LONDON (AP) — Canadian-American writer Ruth Ozeki won the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction on Wednesday for “The Book of Form and Emptiness,” a philosophical and playful novel that explores people’s relationship with possessions.
Ozeki received the 30,000-pound ($36,000) award at a ceremony in London for his story about a grieving boy’s relationship with the books and objects in his home, all of which speak to him. His world grows increasingly cacophonous as his widowed mother deals with his mounting pain.
Ozeki, 66, was raised in Connecticut by a Japanese mother and an American father, and says she began thinking about our relationship with objects while cleaning her parents’ house after they died.
“They were both children of the Depression, so they never threw anything away,” he said. “Every piece of plastic wrap, every piece of aluminum foil, had been carefully washed and put away. He kept thinking, as he went through these things, ‘If only these things could talk’”.
“As children, things always speak to us and we are always making things speak,” he added. world like being alive.”
Ozeki, a professor of English at Smith College in Massachusetts, is also a Zen Buddhist priestess and filmmaker, and her novel was inspired in part by Buddhist philosophy and the ordained Dean Marie Kondo.
“What he is teaching is nothing more than a traditional Japanese way of approaching possessions and objects,” Ozeki said of Kondo. “Take care of your things. The built-in obsolescence that most of our objects have these days seems problematic to me.”
Ozeki is the author of three previous novels, including the environment-themed “My Year of Meats” and “All Over Creation.” He was a 2013 Booker Prize finalist for “A Tale for the Time Being,” a story spanning the Pacific set after the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
British journalist Mary Ann Sieghart, who chaired the Women’s Prize judging panel, said Ozeki’s winning novel “was noted for its brilliant writing, warmth, intelligence, humor and poignancy.”
“A celebration of the power of books and reading, it tackles big life and death issues, and is a joy to read,” he said.
Bookmakers had rated Ozeki’s book as a long shot, behind New Zealand author Meg Mason’s “Sorrow and Bliss,” Turkish-British author Elif Shafak’s “The Island of Missing Trees” and “Great Circle ” by the American writer Maggie Shipstead. This year’s other finalists were “The Sentence” by American writer Louise Erdrich and “The Bread the Devil Knead” by Trinidadian author Lisa Allen-Agostini.
“This is absurd, I don’t win things,” said Ozeki when he was presented with his trophy.
She told The Associated Press that winning the Women’s Award was especially significant.
“I feel like I wouldn’t be writing if it wasn’t for the support of women and women’s institutions,” she said.
The Women’s Prize, founded in 1996, is open to English-language writers from around the world. Previous winners include Zadie Smith, Tayari Jones and Maggie O’Farrell. Last year’s winner was Susanna Clarke for her literary fantasy “Piranesi.”
