Book of Negroes Wins International Literary Award

Canadian Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (HarperCollins Canada) was awarded top honors and a £10,000 for 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Overall Best Book Award.

According to a press release, other cool perks are involved with the award:

As well as winning the £10,000 prize, Overall Best Book winner Lawrence Hill will travel to London for an audience with the Head of the Commonwealth, HM Queen Elizabeth II, at Buckingham Palace, accompanied by Commonwealth Foundation Director, Dr Mark Collins. He will also meet with Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma at the Commonwealth’s Marlborough House headquarters, and give a public reading from his winning book at Foyles' flagship London bookstore.

According to Bloomberg:

Hill’s “The Book of Negroes'” is written in the voice of an 18th-century West African named Aminata Diallo who is abducted from her village as an 11-year-old girl, becomes a slave in South Carolina, wins her freedom during the American Revolutionary War and finds her way back to Sierra Leone. The book has been published in the U.S. under the title “Someone Knows My Name.”

Bloomberg’s full piece is here. A full list of winners can be found here. CanWest News Service sums it all up here.