Stephen Kelman | |
---|---|
Born | 1976 Luton, Bedfordshire, UK |
Nationality | British |
Education | University of Bedfordshire |
Occupation | Author |
Known for | Pigeon English |
Stephen Kelman (born 1976) is an English novelist, who grew up on Marsh Farm council estate in Luton. He studied marketing at the University of Bedfordshire, [1] then worked variously as a warehouse operative, as a caseworker, and in marketing and local government administration.
Kelman took up writing seriously in 2005, as he had wanted to do from a young age. He has completed several feature screenplays since.
Pigeon English, Kelman's debut novel, was inspired by the murder of Damilola Taylor a 10 years old boy who was killed in London by two other young boys. Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, [2] and the Desmond Elliot Prize, gaining him the title 2011 writer of the year and the Guardian first book award. He now lives with his wife Uzma in St Albans.
His latest work, Man on Fire, is a fictional biography of an actual Indian journalist, Bibhuti Bhushan Nayak, with multiple Guinness and Limca Book of Records. The work considers human dignity and male folly, transformation, loss and rebirth. [3] It was released by Bloomsbury Publishing house in 2015 and appeared in 28 countries. [4] [5]
The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a prestigious literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives £50,000, as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1994.
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honour. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia. He has written historical fiction and non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
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Anita Desai, is an Indian novelist and Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature. She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London. Since 2020 she has been a Companion of Literature.
The International Booker Prize is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize, as the Booker Prize was then known, was announced in June 2004. Sponsored by the Man Group, from 2005 until 2015 the award was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. It rewarded one author's "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage", and was a recognition of the writer's body of work rather than any one title.
James Kelman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright and essayist. His fiction and short stories feature accounts of internal mental processes of usually, but not exclusively, working class narrators and their labyrinthine struggles with authority or social interactions, mostly set in his home city of Glasgow. Frequently employing stream of consciousness experimentation, Kelman's stories typically feature "an atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival.".
Pigeon English is the debut novel by English author Stephen Kelman. It is told from the point of view of Harrison Opoku, an eleven-year-old Ghanaian immigrant living on a tough London estate. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011.
How late it was, how late is a 1994 stream-of-consciousness novel written by Scottish writer James Kelman. The Glasgow-centred work is written in a working-class Scottish dialect, and follows Sammy, a shoplifter and ex-convict.
Curtis Brown is a literary and talent agency based in London, UK. One of the oldest literary agencies in Europe, it was founded by Albert Curtis Brown in 1899. It is part of The Curtis Brown Group of companies.
Sir Stephen Harold Spender was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965.
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Paul Pickering is a British novelist and playwright.
Anuradha Roy is an Indian novelist, journalist and editor. She has written five novels: An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008), The Folded Earth (2011), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), All the Lives We Never Lived (2018), and The Earthspinner (2021).
Frances Wilson is an English author, academic, and critic.
Maya Jaggi is a British writer, literary critic, editor and cultural journalist. In the words of the Open University, from which Jaggi received an honorary doctorate in 2012, she "has had a transformative influence in the last 25 years in extending the map of international writing today". Jaggi has been a contributor to a wide range of publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, The Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, New Statesman, Wasafiri, Index on Censorship, and Newsweek, and is particularly known for her profiles of writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and others. She is also a broadcaster and presenter on radio and television. Jaggi is the niece of actor and food writer Madhur Jaffrey.
Bibhuti Bhushan Nayak is an Indian journalist, who holds seven Guinness World Records and 12 Limca Book Records in physical strength to his name. He aims to have 72 records to his name. He currently manages his ancestral business, works as a journalist at The Times of India and teaches underprivileged children martial arts to continue the training of breaking world records. Bibhuti sustains himself on a completely vegetarian diet consisting only of pulses and sprouts. Nayak graduated as a management student from Osmania University. In recognition of his physical strength feats, he was given an honorary title of Singh and a pagri (turban) by the Gurudwara where he attempted the record. In addition to that, he is popularly known as the Bruce Lee of Navi Mumbai, for his martial arts and record breaking accolades.
Man on Fire is a 2015 novel by English author Stephen Kelman and his second novel. The work was published on 13 August 2015 through Bloomsbury and is set in India. It is a fictional biography of Bibhuti Bhushan Nayak, a multiple Guinness and Limca record holder from Mumbai.
Satyarth Nayak is an Indian author and screenwriter, known for his bestselling novel The Emperor's Riddles, authoring the biography of Sridevi and for scripting Sony's historical television epic Porus. The Emperor's Riddles turned out to be a bestselling thriller with the media calling it "a hit with young readers". Porus created by Swastik Productions was one of the most expensive and acclaimed shows on Indian television. Satyarth's biography of screen legend Sridevi titled Sridevi: The Eternal Screen Goddess published in 2019 by Penguin Random House also went on to win high praise. Satyarth has been named one of the Top 50 Indian authors to follow on social media.