The overall winners of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prizes were announced on Sunday 18 May at the Franschloek Literary Festival in South Africa.

The Book of Negroes by Canadian author Lawrence Hill (HarperCollins) has won the overall best book award, worth £10,000,  and A Golden Age (John Murray) Bangladeshi author Tahmina Anam has won the overall best first book award, worth £5000 .

The panel of judges from six different countries described Hill's novel as ‘epic in scope'. ‘This is the remarkable odyssey of Aminata Diallo. Sold into slavery, wresting her freedom, she survives to tell her story of courage, endurance and hope. Compellingly narrated, this literary triumph challenges us to reexamine the history of slavery,' said chair of the judges Nicholas Hasluck.
Hill will travel to London where he will meet Queen Elizabeth II and give a public reading from his novel. Upon winning the prize Hill said he was thilled at ‘the opportunity it presents. ‘As a Canadian novelist, with the usual challenges that writers in small markets [face], it is thrilling to receive the Prize.'

Anam said she was ‘honoured and humbled to be the first ever Bangladeshi winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize'. The author said she wrote A Golden Age to bring the story of the Bangladesh war to an international audience.

The judges described the book as ‘the first major fictional account in English of the creation of Bangladesh.'

The Commonwealth Writers' Prize is presented annually by the Commonwealth Foundation for the best Commonwealth fiction written in English, by both established and new writers.

Australian authors Steven Carroll and Karen Foxlee were the regional winners of the South East Asia and South Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize; Carroll's novel The Time We Have Taken (Fourth Estate) won for best book and Foxlee's The Anatomy of Wings (UQP) for best first book.

For more information on the prize, visit the CWP website

This article from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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