Neustadt International Prize for Literature

• First Voices is a Grade 11 English course that replaces works by authors like Shakespeare and Fitzgerald with texts authored by Indigenous writers like Cherie Dimaline and Richard Wagamese.
• Over the summer, our Indigenous literatures lab, led by Haudenosaunee scholar Jennifer Brant at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, examined contemporary Indigenous-authored young adult texts that are well-suited for the First Voices course.

Importance of Indigenous perspectives

• With the replacement of long-read literature comes the task of selecting texts that centre Indigenous resurgence and what Indigenous literary scholar Gerald Vizenor refers to as survivance.
• We hope to see the stories in classrooms across the country that centre Indigenous community narratives from the voices of Indigenous Peoples.

Upholding responsibilities

• As Cherokee author and scholar Daniel Heath Justice writes, good stories are needed that give “shape, substance and purpose” to Indigenous Peoples’ existences and shed light on how to uphold responsibilities to one another and to creation.
• These stand in contrast to stories Justice discusses as “bad medicine,” stories often imposed from the outside, from the perspective of the colonizer.

Engaging with books

• We encourage educators to take a strength-based perspective when discussing Indigenous literature, and also to take an anti-racist approach.
• Anti-racist approaches acknowledge varied experiences of racism, and would help students think critically about their own lives in relationship to these books.
• Read more:
  Why you shouldn't be afraid of critical race theory — Podcast

  Books featured here are highly acclaimed, and show narratives of Indigenous resurgence.

• It is a story about a Métis-Anishinaabe teen and her family who are drastically impacted by a violent crime in Winnipeg.
• As investigations uncover many unknowns, readers get meaningful insights into the realities of various characters whose lives are intricately woven together.
• Maracle followed Ravensong with Celia’s Song, a finalist in the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

• It feels too soon, perhaps because in everything he wrote, he opened up new ways of thinking, writing and reading.
• From the start, he was exposed to, and immersed in, the absurdity of human culture.
• He grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, then lived under Stalinist rule, where he was an active member of the Communist Party.
• I have been reading him, quoting him and teaching from his writings for decades, after bumping into his work in 1988.

Interrogating totalitarianism, with humour

• But in each novel, Kundera offers some humour – often bitter, but capable of leavening the otherwise bleak, and densely reported, content.
• But he also develops an erotic narrative that seems to suggest lighthearted sex can allow us to live fully in the moment.
• Weight and lightness, laughter and forgetting, repetition and change, politics and sex: his first four novels incorporate such dualities.

Author in exile

• In 1975, he fled his home for exile in France, and continued writing works of fiction that mostly followed the signature structure he first developed in The Joke: multi-part, multi-voiced novels, where the narrator interpolates critique, commentary and philosophical statements in the text.
• This makes for a restless story, one that shifts to and fro across locations, times and contexts.
• The focus of Kundera’s novels is their wrestle with questions of knowledge, the complexity of being and a constant uncertainty.

‘Things are not as simple as you think’

• In The Art of the Novel (1986), he outlines a history of how novelists unpacked various dimensions of existence.
• Homer never wondered whether, after all their many hand-to-hand battles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.
• But for Don Quixote and Sancho teeth are a perpetual concern – hurting teeth, missing teeth.
• Homer never wondered whether, after all their many hand-to-hand battles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.

Teller of inconvenient truths

• He won other prizes, after all, among them the Jerusalem Prize in 1985 and the Herder Prize in 2000.
• Perhaps it was his writing style that meant the Nobel committee saw him nominated on a number of occasions, but never awarded him the prize.
• Robin Ashenden suggests he “had become a teller of truths inconvenient to the modern age”, and maybe there is something in that.

• NORMAN, Okla., Oct. 26, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma's award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, announced late Tuesday evening that Boubacar Boris Diop is the 27th laureate of the renowned Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
• Awarded in alternating years with the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's and Young Adult Literature, the Neustadt Prize recognizes outstanding literary merit in literature worldwide.
• Writer and translator Jennifer Croft nominated Diop for the Neustadt Prize.
• The Neustadt Prize announcement was made via Zoom as part of the 2021 Neustadt Lit Fest.