Winner of the Lettre Ulysses Award for the art of reportage 2006

The international jury of the Lettre Ulysses Award, the only world prize for literary reportage, announced this year’s winner on September 30th in Berlin’s TIPI Tent, in the presence of all seven finalists, the international jury of prestigious reportage writers and more than 500 international guests from the worlds of art and culture, media, politics and diplomacy.

The winners:

The first prize of 50,000 USD and a trophy designed by the Berlin artist Jakob Mattner were awarded to:

LINDA GRANT, Great Britain: The People on the Street. A Writer’s View of Israel, Virago Press, London, 2006. The British journalist and writer Linda Grant, a non-religious Diaspora Jew, travels to Tel Aviv in 2003. Her visit becomes an opportunity for a systematic and in-depth exploration of Jewish identity and its relationship with the state of Israel. Her book is a journey through an extraordinary and problematic society, through the languages and biographies of its inhabitants, their archetypes and histories, their doubts and their hopes. Observations from a troubled land that is determined to defend its existence and that is ensnared in a conflict that seems to promise tragic consequences rather than peaceful prospects.

The second prize (30,000 USD) was awarded to:

ERIK ORSENNA, France: Voyage aux pays du coton. Petit précis de mondialisation, Fayard, Paris, 2006 [Journey to the Lands of Cotton. A Brief Manual of Globalisation]. On his journey through the lands of cotton, the French writer Erik Orsenna visited plantations in Mali and the United States, research laboratories and farms in Brazil and museums in Egypt, dried out lakes and steeps in Uzbekistan, textile factories in China and France are all places of encounter with the raw material which has marked the history of entire countries and which to this day hundreds of millions of people still depend upon for their livelihoods. The book brings the mechanisms of globalisation to life, the fight for market shares, the struggle for new products, the conflict between history and modernisation, between multinational companies and more traditional economies, the rhetoric of open markets and the global practice of lobbying.

The third prize (20,000 USD) went to:

JUANITA LEÓN, Colombia: País de plomo. Crónicas de guerra, Aguilar, 2005 [Country of Bullets. War Diaries]. Since 1948 Columbia has been torn apart by violence and civil war. A guerrilla movement of “liberals”, and the peasant self defence committees, supported by the Communist Party, formed in opposition to the conservative oligarchy and the military leadership. Then later the drug cartels and paramilitaries appeared on the scene. In her book, the Columbian journalist Juanita León describes the important aspects of the drama: The suffering of the rural population, the ravages of the death squads, the incompetence of the government, the role of the drug economy and the increasing loss of humanity. Observations and encounters in a war with many fronts.

The other finalists received prizes in the form of a working residencies in Berlin (endowed by the Goethe-Institut) and valuable handmade watches by the company Nomos.

They are:

KARL-MARKUS GAUß, Austria: Die Hundeesser von Svinia, Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna, 2004 [The Dog Eaters of Svinia]. Slovakia is one of the newest members of the European Union and with its low wages and taxes it is seen as a true investor’s paradise. 800,000 Roma also live there. In The Dog Eaters of Svinia, Gauß reports on the journeys he undertook between 2001 and 2003 in the east of the country. There he immerses himself in the life of the Roma who, with their history of displacement, persecution and contempt, are among the poorest people in Europe. Ignored by the majority society, they live in some 300 suburban ghettos and rural settlements. Their everyday life is marked by loss of identity, poverty and disorientation. The Svinia slum is a place that seems to have fallen out of the world, and out of time. This limbo is where the “dog eaters” live, the lowest of all castes, the Roma’s pariahs.

LI DATONG, China: ‘Bingdian’ Gushi, Guangxi Shifan Daxue Chubanshe, 2005 [The Story of “Freezing Point”, Guangxi Normal University Press]. In January 2006 news of the closure of the magazine “Freezing Point” Weekly shook China’s political and cultural media. With this move the Chinese government killed off a beacon of hope for freedom of opinion. “Freezing Point” was the weekly supplement of the Communist Youth League organ and was edited by the journalist Li Datong. He had been banned from working for five years following the Tiananmen Square massacre but in 1995, during a period of commercialisation and liberalisation, he became the editor of this publication. Brave and humane reportages revealed an image of a society in which lawlessness, corruption, exploitation and the propaganda of state-controlled mass media set the tone. As it increasingly became the most popular publication in China, “Freezing Point” was also becoming more and more inconvenient. Li Datong tells the story of the conflict, of the rise and fall of the magazine.

MANJUSHREE THAPA, Nepal: Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy, Penguin Viking India, New Delhi, 2005. The murder of the Nepalese king in the royal palace massacre of 2001 shook the legitimacy of the ruling dynasty. Parliamentary democracy was replaced, and democratic rights and freedoms were suspended. The poverty of the rural population gave rise to Maoist guerrillas, who today control entire regions of the country. Manjushree Thapa’s reportage leads the reader through the Byzantine power structures and to the remote western mountainous region of this Himalayan country, where many villagers and rural people have fled the epidemic violence. The patriarchal oppression of women in the society and family is one reason why so many of the guerrillas are young women. Amidst all this destruction the author sees the growth of a democratic consciousness.

ZHOU QING, China: Min Yihe Shi Wei Tian. Zhongguo Shipin Anquan Xianzhuang Diaocha, Bangao Wenxue, 9/2004 [“What Kind of God. A Survey of the Current Safety of China’s Food”, in: Reportage Literature 9/2004]. The wealth of its cuisine attests to just how much China’s four-thousand-year history is linked to the history of its food. In today’s country of the “Chinese Economic Myth,” with its growth rates, skyscrapers, and global market success, the theme of foodstuffs is once against of extreme importance. In the realm of food and drink the desire for quick wealth can also lead to a lack of moral scruples. Zhou Qing interviewed food manufacturers and restaurant owners, fish farmers, peasants, traders, doctors, and consumers. Contraceptive pills accelerate fish farming, the pesticide DDVP keeps pickles from going off, hormones are used to replace foodstuffs, salt is chemically enhanced, industrial oil is altered to make cooking oil. An entire people are poisoning themselves.

Excerpts from the nominated texts are published in German in the current issue of Lettre International, Nr. 74.

The winners were announced on Saturday 30th September in Berlin at an award ceremony with 500 international guests from literature, art, culture, media, politics and diplomacy. The South African writer Breyten Breytenbach and the speaker of the jury Isabel Hilton were the evening’s presenters.

The annual Lettre Ulysses Award was initiated in 2003 by the cultural journal Lettre International in association with the Aventis Foundation. The Goethe-Institut is a partner of the project.

In 2006 the prize has a total endowment of 100,000 USD, as well as working residencies in Berlin and other prizes.

The aim of the award is to bring the outstanding achievements of literary reportage and the themes of the nominated books to the focus of international attention and to support its authors both morally, materially and symbolically.

The members of the 2006 jury, as native speakers, represent ten of the world’s largest language regions, the working language of the jury was English. The composition of the jury guarantees the widest range of linguistic and cultural perception. The members of the 2006 jury were: Gamal al-Ghitany (Egypt), Andrei Bitov (Russia), Urvashi Butalia (India), Nedim Gürsel, (Turkey), Isabel Hilton (Great Britain), Anne Nivat (France), Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), Pedro Rosa Mendes (Portugal), Ilija Trojanow (Germany), Yang Lian (China).