The £10,000 RSL Ondaatje Prize, for a work “that best evokes the spirit of a place”, was awarded last night to Lea Ypi for Free, a memoir chronicling her coming- of-age in Albania during the fall of communism.
Ypi is professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, and political science and adjunct professor in philosophy at the Australian National University. Her book was also short-listed for the 2021 Costa Biography Award and the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize. She will be one of the speakers at a session of the forum 5×15 on March 23. Also on the bill is William Atkins, who, in his latest book, Exiles, travels to the places where three people were banished at the height of European colonialism.
Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment (William Collins) is one of six books short-listed today for the £10,000 RSL Ondaatje Prize, for a work “that best evokes the spirit of a place”. The other books are:
The Manningtree Witches by A K Blakemore (Granta)
Writing the Camp by Yousif M Qasmiyeh (Broken Sleep Books)
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera (Viking)
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (Penguin)
Free by Lea Ypi (Allen Lane).
The winner will be announced on May 4.
A quick mention of a couple of new books on place and travel that have appeared recently in the US: Extreme North: A Cultural History by Bernd Brunner (W W Norton & Company), which Liesl Schillinger, in The New York Times, describes as “an idiosyncratic inquiry into the power of the north in the popular imagination” (I’m reminded of Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North); and Riverman by Ben McGrath (Alfred A Knopf), which was inspired by the disappearance of a canoeist, Dick Conant, and is, according to Gregory Cowles, also in The NY Times, “a portrait of forgotten American byways and the eccentric characters who populate them, a cursory history of river travel in America and, not least, an effort to solve the riddle of Conant himself — not only his whereabouts but also his elusive and irresistible nature”.
The story of Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s extraordinary journey from Togo to Greenland, which I mentioned in a recent roundup of forthcoming books, is now out in a new edition from Penguin.
The author is currently living in Paris, but since he first arrived in the Arctic, in 1965, he has been back three times. This year, at 81, he is returning again — to live out his remaining years. He told Michael Segalov, who interviewed him for a piece published yesterday in The Observer: “It’s my destiny.”