Farah wins reportage prize

Somalian writer Nuruddin Farah has won second prize with his reportage work for Yesterday Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora, and publishing by Continuum International. Farah takes home a prize of 30 000 euro.

The winners of the awards were announced in a ceremony on Saturday, October 4, in the presence of 450 guests from the worlds of literature, culture and politics in Berlin. Guest speaker at the awards gala was the Polish reportage author Ryszard Kapuscinski; the South African author Breyten Breytenbach acted as master of ceremonies for the evening.

This award for the worldwide best reportage literature has been initiated by the cultural journal Lettre International. The Aventis Foundation supports and promotes the project. The Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes is a partner of the Lettre Ulysses Award. The initiators aim to raise worldwide attention for the art of reportage and to support authors in this genre in their work. Until now, awards for reportage literature have been restricted to nationally, regionally or linguistically delineated areas. From October 2003 onwards, the worldwide prizes are to be awarded annually for works with a first publication date within the last two years. The works entered in this year's premiere of the Lettre Ulysses Award have a first publication date after the beginning of the year 2000.


The Shortlist of works chosen for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage (ordered alphabetically)
1. Ian Buruma
Bad Elements - Chinese rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing
Random House, New York, 2001. English

2. Nuruddin Farrah
Yesterday Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora
Continuum International, London, New York, 2000. English

3. Jiang Hao
Revealing the Secrets of Poachers
Qunzhong chubansche, Beijing, 2000. Chinese

4. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
Scribner, New York, 2003. English

5. Anna Politkovskaja
Tchétchénie: le déshonneur russe
Buchet/Castel, Paris, 2003. Russian/French

6. Linda Polman
We Did Nothing
Viking, London, 2003. Dutch

7. Marc Tully and Gillian Wright
India in Slow Motion
Viking, London, 2002. English

Further information on the idea of the prize and on the jury can be found at the home page:
www.lettre-ulysses-award.org