Every Saturday, “Culture Weekly” summarizes and flashes to you the latest week of foreign literary circles, no edition, book shop industry worth knowing the big and small things. This week, our topic is Kingsolver’s return to the Women’s Avenue Award and the controversy over letters from the French Revolution.
Barbara Kingsolver won the Women’s Avenue Award again, becoming the first two-time winner in history
On June 14, local time, American filmmaker Barbara Kingsolver once again won this year’s Women’s Avenue Award for her new work “Demon Copperhead” – her previous work “The Lacuna” won in 2010. Kingsolver became the first artist in history to win the award twice.
Established in 1996, the Women’s Avenue Award is open to all women who have written in English and have not produced in the UK. The prize is 30,000 pounds (about 260,000 yuan), and previous winners include Chinese artists Mei Tam and Xiaolu Guo and Canadian artists Margaret Atwood.
Kingsolver’s winning work this year, “The Browned Devil,” a retelling of Dickens’s classic “David Copperfield,” is set in Appalachia in 1990 and highlights the toll drug addiction has taken on the region, which earlier lost out on this year’s Pulitzer Prize. “Dickens wrote David Copperfield as a protest against the persecution of poor children, and I didn’t write this book for the same reason,” Kingsolver explained at the awards ceremony.
Barbara Kingsolver at the Women’s Walk Awards Photo Source: Women’s Walk Awards website
The jury for this year’s Women’s Avenue Awards is made up of British actress Louise Minchin, British entrepreneur Rachel Joyce and British Member of Parliament Tulip Siddiq. The head judge, Minchin, said the award to Kingsolver “had the unanimous pleasure of the judges”, “she has written a very colourless and important work in every sense”.
Kingsolver declined an interview with The Independent newspaper after the award, saying she had been aware of drug addiction in Appalachia “long before the preamble,” saying, “I live here… When I was growing up, it was all about beer, whiskey and marijuana. Now it’s all about longevity creams and addictive drugs.”
“It’s a matter of life and death,” Kingsolver exaggerates, “and the children are the most neglected part.” There’s a generation of kids growing up in a terrible foster care system, and others living with relatives who simply don’t want to respond to them… This will be a generational trauma that will stay with us forever.” In “The Brown-haired Devil,” Kingsolver puts a human face on drug addiction by telling the story of what happened to the protagonist. The reason for this, she explained, was a desire for readers to “better understand and empathize with the area and the disease.”
Brunette Demon
Kingsolver remembers being ridiculed for her “accent and rural air” when she first left her Kentucky hometown for college. In the years that followed, in order to “lose success and sit down with others,” she tried to cover up this part of herself, writing in a more urban tone, but she found that the blank ink was “meaningless and fake.” “It wasn’t until I read the work of Kentucky makers like Bobby Ann Mason and Wendell Berry that I realized there were people who came from the same place I did, who embraced their identity and wrote about it. When I started to do the same, I found myself, but I found myself. I found out that I was Appalachian until I lost touch with it.”
That’s one of the goals Kingsolver wanted to achieve with “The Brunned-Haired Devil,” which is to break through the stereotypes and the concept of companionship that are familiar to residents of Appalachia. “When we don’t show up on TV or in movies, it’s usually a look, a backward white person, which is very incomplete… There are mosses, trees, mountains and streams, and people are self-sufficient. We are a group of people connected through community in a way that no other place can be.”
Poison Wood Bible
Translated by Barbara Kingsolver Zhang 竝
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To write the book’s story, Kingsolver spent three years gathering data, the most important part of which was talking to recovering addicts. She was particularly touched by the women she met in the process, “who were generous and happy to sit and spend hours and hours telling me about the most horrible and humiliating experiences of their lives and the things they were forced to do to get their jobs done.” I can’t do that.”
Kingsolver and several of the women became bitter enemies and remain united to this day. After winning, Kingsolver received a congratulatory text from them: “Our book has won!” “I can probably hear the cheers all the way from Virginia, because their stories are being seen and heard,” Kingsolver said proudly.
In the avenue, Kingsolver is not optimistic about the future of addiction, but in reality she does not think so, “I have to be full of desire, I do not other decisions.” Giving up the desire also means giving up the possession of the past, which is an irresponsible move. I can’t do that for my children, or anyone’s children.”
The local government of Normandy in France is to go to court with the French culture ministry over the ownership of letters from the French Revolution
“The Death of Marat” is one of the most famous paintings of the French reactionary period. In the painting, Jean-Paul Marat, a radical reactionary leader, lies on his side on the edge of a bathtub, bleeding profuse, holding a letter left by the murderer, Charlotte Corday. But perhaps no one could have imagined that, more than two centuries later, the letter in the painting would become the focus of recent French cultural circles.
According to the Guardian, in the letter, Corday described her thoughts about killing Marla. Between September 2 and 7, 1972, a wave of criminal killings swept across the country, known as the “September Massacre.” The cause of the accident was that activists worried that prisoners in prison would join the ranks of the supporters in the future, so they shouted that they would kill them first, and Mara was one of the leading figures.
The Familiarity of Marat
After this accident, Corday, a moderate member, believes that the big reactionaries have been outwitted by the violent radicals, and she decides to assassinate Marat to save more innocent prisoners. Corday sneaks into Marla’s home and murders him with a kitchen knife while Marla is in the bath. After her arrest, Corday famously said, “I killed one man to save 100,000.” Corday was eventually executed by decapitation, and the Radicals, believing that her lover had ordered her to commit the murder, conducted a “purity check” on her body, but found that she was “a woman of noble character”.
Herve Morin, the head of Normandy’s regional council, declined to be interviewed, saying, “We have decided to take legal steps to become the owner of this letter, even though the litigation could go on for years.” The ministry of Culture had the opportunity to own the document before the auction, and now they want to show the power of the state, and we will show them the power of the law.”
It is not known that the letter was indeed mentioned in the police report at the time, but the letter was soon found and did not reappear until 1834, when it was snapped up by a private collector. The letter is still in the auction hands, waiting for the final owner to decide.