Category: General Knowledge

Alternative Nobel Literature Prize, a one-off award intended to fill the void left by the cancellation of prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature 2018 after a scandal at the Swedish Academy that awards it, has been won by Maryse Condé one of the Caribbean’s most renowned authors, on Friday 12 October 2018. Maryse Condé will win about £87,000 raised from crowd funding and donations, and will receive the prize at a ceremony on 9 December 2018, one day before the Nobel banquet.

Maryse Condé was born on 11 February 1937 in Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean. She studied at the Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), where she took her doctorate in Comparative Literature in 1975 for her research on Black stereotypes in Caribbean literature. Condé is author of historical fiction, best known for her third novel Ségou published in 1984, She is author of 20 novels, including Desirada, and Crossing the Mangrove. Condé is, according to the chair of judges Ann Pålsson, a “grand storyteller” who “belongs to world literature”. She is also a scholar of Francophone Literature and Professor Emerita of French at Columbia University. She writes her novels in French, whcih have been translated into English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. She had been awarded Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, Latin America and Caribbean.

Alternative Nobel Literature Prize was set up by New Academy formed by more than 100 Swedish writers, artists and journalists in protest to denounce what its founders called the “bias, arrogance and sexism” of the venerable Swedish Academy, which selects Nobel laureates. The Swedish Academy was plunged into turmoil in 2017 over its ties to Frenchman Jean-Claude Arnault, who was jailed for two years in early October for rape. The New Academy will be dissolved in December 2018.

The winner was announced at a Stockholm library after a three-fold judging process, starting with hundreds of libraries Swedish librarians nominating 47 authors, who were winnowed down to a final four by a public vote by almost 33000 members, and the winner was decided by an expert jury. This selection process was in stark contrast to the secretive deliberations of the Nobel jury of the Swedish Academy.

Maryse Condé was one of the initial four finalists, nominated alongside Japan’s Haruki Murakami, UK’s Neil Gaiman and Vietnamese-born Canadian Kim Thuy, reduced to three after Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, often cited as a frontrunner for the Nobel, withdrew in September citing a desire to “concentrate on his writing, away from media attention”.

Nobel Chemistry Prize 2018 has been won by Frances H Arnold and George P Smith of the United States and Gregory P Winter of Great Britain, for applying the principles of evolution to develop enzymes used to make everything from biofuels to medicine, as per announcement at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday October 3, 2018 in Stockholm. Arnold, just the fifth woman to clinch chemistry’s most prestigious honour, won one half of the nine million Swedish kronor (about $1.01 million or € 870,000) award, while Smith and Gregory Winter shared the other half.

This year’s Nobel Laureates in chemistry according to Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:

• Have been inspired by the power of evolution and used the same principles — genetic change and selection — to develop proteins that solve mankind’s chemical problems.
• Have taken control of evolution and used it for purposes that bring the greatest benefit to humankind.
• Have applied the principles of Darwin in test tubes.
• Have used molecular understanding that we have of the evolutionary process and recreated the process in their labs.
• Have been able to make evolution many 1000s of times faster and redirect it to create new proteins.

Frances H Arnold, 62, US biochemical engineer, who has survived breast cancer and is a single mother to three sons, is a professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Her method of rewriting DNA to mimic evolution has helped solve problems such as replacing toxic chemicals like fossil fuels. Creating new proteins with desired properties is being used to convert renewable resources like sugar cane into biofuels, and to make more environmentally friendly chemical substances, improving everyday products such as laundry and dishwashing detergents to enhance their performance in cold temperatures.

As a result, renewable resources like sugar cane are being converted into biofuels. More environmentally friendly chemical substances are being developed, improving everyday products such as laundry and dishwashing detergents to enhance their performance in cold temperatures.

Arnold’s breakthrough came when she allowed evolutionary forces such as selection and even chance to govern the development of enzymes, while still subtly guiding them. It was the 1st step toward a revolution.

Arnold said in 2016, “The most beautiful complex and functional objects on the planet have been made by evolution. We can now use evolution to make things that no human knows how to design.” She now stated, “Evolution is the most powerful engineering method in the world, and we should make use of it to find new biological solutions to the problem.” “Instead of pumping oil out of the ground for making gasoline, now we can use sunlight stored in plant.”

George Smith, and Gregory Winter, honoured for “phage display of peptides and antibodies”, had focused on viruses that infect bacteria called phages
and developed an “elegant method” known as phage display, where a bacteriophage can be used to evolve new proteins.

George Smith (US), 77, was a professor for 40 years at the University of Missouri at the Division of Biological Sciences, invented a method in which these invading phages introduce antibodies – which function like “targeted missiles”.

Gregory Winter (UK) 67, of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge,
on his part – then applied directed evolution to develop the world’s first pharmaceutical entirely based on a human antibody.

Pharmaceuticals (drugs) used against rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel diseases have resulted from their research, as well as anti-bodies that can neutralise toxins, counteract autoimmune diseases and cure metastatic cancer.

Reach All Women in WAR (RAW in WAR) Anna Politkovskaya award 2018, one of the prestigious international award given to women human rights defenders from war and conflict zones, has been conferred jointly to Binalakshmi Nepram, an activist from Manipur in northeast India and Nobel literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich, a renowned writer and investigative journalist from Belarus. Remarkably, both women awardees have suffered death threats or persecution and are in exile from their home countries.  RAW in WAR, a UK-based charity organization that provides this award, applauding the bravery of both women in speaking out and defying injustice, violence and extremism in the context of ‘forgotten’ armed conflicts, announced the courageous global award on micro-blogging site Twitter on Thursday October 4, 2018.

The awards will be presented to the winners in March 2019 in London at RAW in WAR’s ‘Refusing to be Silenced’ event, which is part of the 2019 Women of the World Festival at the London’s Southbank Centre.

RAW in War annually gives out the award to mark the anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya’s, a Russian journalist, writer and human rights activist, who was assassinated in the elevator of her Moscow apartment block at the age of 48 on October 7, 2006. Politkovskaya extensively reported on Russia’s volatile political developments, particularly, the second Chechen war (1999-2005). Her fearless work put her in the Russian military’s line of fire. She was arrested by the military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. Anna Politkovskaya Award is given to celebrate women human rights defenders from conflict zones, who like Politkovskaya face life-threatening situations.

Binalakshmi Nepram, born in Imphal, a humanitarian female activist, on the Indo-Myanmar border, for the advocacy of gender rights and women-led disarmament movements with the objective of arresting gun culture and bringing about peace for her home state of Manipur in particular and northeast India in general, had once worked for Oxfam, co-founded Control Arms Foundation of India (CAFI) in 2004 – India’s first civil society organisation to work on disarmament and to oppose growing militarisation. She is the author of ‘India and the Arms Trade Treaty’. She is also the founder of Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, which has since its inception in 2007 helped more than 20,000 women survivors of gun violence in Manipur to rebuild their lives and obtain justice.

Svetlana Alexievich, 70, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 for her portrayal of the lives of Soviet women during World War II, as well as the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Soviet military adventure in Afghanistan, and for speaking out about injustices in the post-Soviet space and giving voice to those trapped in conflict. She repeatedly criticized the Russian annexation of Crimea and human rights violations in Ukraine. Under threats from President Lukashenko for the publication of her books, she stayed in exile and returned to Belarus, a landlocked nation in Eastern Europe.

Man Booker Prize 2018: was awarded to Anna Burns, for ‘incredibly original’ “Milkman”, her timely, Troubles-set novel about a young woman being sexually harassed by a powerful man, a work set in a divided society which takes inspiration from the Northern Ireland of her childhood, received on Tuesday 16 October 2018 her trophy from Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, during a black-tie ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall.

Anna Burns beats five other following finalists to win this award:

• American Writer Richard Powers’ tree-centric eco-epic The Overstory
• Canadian Novelist Esi E Edugyan’s Washington Black, the story of a slave who escapes from a sugar plantation in a hot-air balloon.
• American Novelist Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, set in a women’s prison;
• Scottish Poet Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, a verse novel about a traumatized D-Day veteran; and
• British Author 27-year-old Daisy Johnson’s Greek tragedy-inspired family saga Everything Under.

Anna Burns, 56, Belfast-born novelist is the first writer from Northern Ireland to win UK’s most important literary the prestigious £50,000 award, who has often struggled financially since 2002 Orange prize listing for her first novel, “No Bones”. Burns said that with her prize money, “I will clear my debts and live on what’s left.” Previous Irish winners, John Banville, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle, were from the republic. Burns is the first female winner since 2013, when Eleanor Catton took the award with The Luminaries.

Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland, officially named Ireland, which covers five-sixths of the island; and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdon.

Milkman, a vibrant, violent story about men, women, conflict and power set during Northern Ireland’s years of Catholic-Protestant violence. Burns said the germ of Milkman came to her in the image of a teenage girl walking down a street in a divided city while reading the novel Ivanhoe. Burns told reporters, “I just wait for my characters to come and tell me their stories, and I can’t write until they do”.

Milkman, the experimental novel, Burns’s third, is narrated by an unnamed 18-year-old girl, known as “middle sister”, who is being pursued by a much older paramilitary figure, the milkman, who uses family ties, social pressure and political loyalties as weapons of sexual coercion and harassment. Novel is set in the 1970s, but was published amid the global eruption of sexual misconduct allegations that sparked the #MeToo movement.

Booker’s chair of judges, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, announcing the win at a dinner at the Guildhall in London, said, it is “incredibly original”, “None of us has ever read anything like this before”, and added, “Anna Burns’s utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour.”

Man Booker Prize for Fiction, for the first time awarded 49 years ago in 1949, then known as the Booker–McConnell, is a literary prize awarded each year is for the best original novel written in English language and published in the UK. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade.  From its inception, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African (and later Zimbabwean) citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, however, this eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change which proved controversial.

A high-profile literary award in British culture, the Booker Prize is greeted with great anticipation and fanfare. It is also a mark of distinction for authors to be selected for inclusion in the shortlist or even to be nominated for the “long-list”.