John Spurling’s TheTen Thousand Things, the story of Wang Meng, a minor bureaucrat of imperial China who found solace in his exquisite painting during the dying years of the Yuan dynasty, has won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Alistair Moffat, the chairman of the judges said “the illumination shone by John Spurling…
Books with a special sense of place vie for Ondaatje Prize
Baghdad, Delhi, Estonia, Cornwall, the east end of London and Turkey are the stars in the shortlist for the Ondaatje Prize which celebrates “a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place”. Rana Dasgupta Capital (Canongate) Helen Dunmore The Lie (Hutchinson) Tobias Hill What Was Promised (Bloomsbury Circus) Justin Marozzi Baghdad: City of Peace,…