Word: whitbread
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...read. I don't know anyone who finished "Infinite Jest." And do you remember the fuss over Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" (a bestselling dust-collector if there ever was one)? And who read Seamus Heaney's new translation of "Beowulf" other than this year's Whitbread Prize judges? "Harry Potter," on the other hand, will be read over and over and passed from person to person. This book takes you back to a time in your childhood when you might spend an entire Saturday in your pajamas reading just...
...joke, it turns out, was on the chucklers. In January, a British panel chose Beowulf for the Whitbread Award as the best book of 1999, with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban running a close second. But these judges, of course, did not suddenly come to their senses about the merits of a manuscript composed sometime late in the first millennium. They gave their prize--and an instant spot at the top of British best-seller lists--to a new verse translation of Beowulf by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize...
...poet laureate, whose official duties include celebrating the queen?s birthday and commemorating other royal occasions. Many feared that like Wordsworth, one of his predecessors in the role, his talent and love of nature would be stifled. But Hughes sparkled. His 1997 offering, "Tales of Ovid," won the Whitbread Book of the Year award -? a top literary prize -? for what the judges called its "greatness and sublimity." He brought an uncompromising perspective to the laureate role, too. For example, his 1986 poem in praise of Prince Andrew?s wedding to Sarah Ferguson raised eyebrows for focusing on details like...
Heaney was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literaturein 1995 and Britain's Whitbread Award two yearslater. Much of his work reflects the troubledpolitical and social situation of his homeland...
...take fictional liberties with Scripture. He won't be the last. But his new effort proves to be one of the more successful reimaginings. Readers and critics in Britain thought so: when Quarantine was published there last year, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award...