Troy Blacklaws has won the Lire Magazine award for Best Discovery in Foreign Fiction 2013 for his novel CRUEL CRAZY BEAUTIFUL WORLD, published in France by Flammarion, and translated by Pierre Guglielmina. Other winners of the award this year include Pierre LeMaitre for Best French Novel and Joyce Carol Oates for Best Foreign Novel. Lire Magazine also recognised Troy’s debut novel KAROO BOY with an award in 2006.
CRUEL CRAZY BEAUTIFUL WORLD is set in South Africa in 2004. Jerusalem (half Muslim, half Jew) is a young student with poetic leanings. Jabulani loses his teaching job for making a satirical remark about Mugabe and flees his native Zimbabwe. As the two men's lives merge, their stories reveal the paradoxes of the Southern African experience.
Troy Blacklaws is a South African writer, photographer, and English teacher, who currently lives in Luxembourg. He is also author of the semi-autobiographical BLOOD ORANGE and his prize-winning debut novel KAROO BOY. KAROO BOY was shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize 2005, and the Prix Femina for foreign fiction 2006, the year of his previous Lire accolade. In Germany KAROO BOY was longlisted for the International Literature Award 2009, given by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
Praise for Troy Blacklaws:
‘With his supple and inventive use of the language, Blacklaws creates fully realized characters and vivid imagery that shimmers against a stark backdrop.’ -- John Berendt, author of MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL
‘Troy Blacklaws effortlessly conjures up the sights, sounds and rhythms of the South African landscape.’ -- Vikas Swarup, author of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
Praise for CRUEL CRAZY BEAUTIFUL WORLD:
‘Mesmerising and evocative.’ -- Deon Meyer, author of TRACKERS
‘A sense of metaphor breathes poetic dimension into the novel that lifts its writing to a higher plane. [...] one of those books which manage to bewitch the reader from the very first paragraphs, as much by the storyline as by the realism of the lands painted therein.’ -- Alexis Brunet, La Cause Littéraire
‘Astonishingly rich…A fresh and vivid depiction of South Africa…Similes and metaphors leap off the page, landscape and inner feelings are described in ways I have not experienced before which allow one to see and experience the familiar as something strange and exotic.’ -- Hazel Barnes, The Witness