By Mursi Saad El-Din With the new Decibel Prize for writers of African, Caribbean and Asian descent, Britain can claim 300-odd prizes, great and small. This prize was an initiative from the Arts Council of England which aimed at "encouraging cultural diversity. Six writers have been short listed for this prize. One of these six is Benjamin Zephaniah from Rastafaria, known for having said "no" to an OBE and, at another occasion, declined an honorary degree from a British university on the premise of its association with "a blood-stained stolen empire". In a poem with the title Bought and Sold, Zephaniah writes: "Smart big awards and prize money / Is killing off black poetry". He has not, however, objected to this new prize, claiming, according to Sarah Shannon in the London Independent, that "Any award that raises the profile of a struggling minority community is a good thing," adding, "I think there should be no need for an Orange Prize for women literature or a Decibel Prize. But there is still discrimination." Another nominee for the prize, the Asian Hari Kunzura, last year refused the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize on the grounds that its sponsors, "The Mail on Sunday" showed "hostility towards black and Asian people." The Decibel Prize, however, is more palatable though, in his opinion, it "fails to address the real problem in publishing -- the fact that it remains a white, middle-class enclave." This opinion is supported by a survey commissioned by the Arts Council which discovered that the people in publishing think they work in "a white middle-class ghetto". A woman nominee is Andrea Levy from Jamaica. According to the Independent article, she received 80 rejection letters before a publisher accepted her first novel. And yet she has collected the Orange Prize for women literature, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her latest book Small Island is selling "in its hundreds of thousands of copies". Beside more popular awards and prizes -- like the Booker, the Man Booker, Whitbread and others -- a new prize is the one created by the Independent newspaper: the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which came into being only a few weeks ago. According to Boyd Tonkin, who was once member of a jury for literary prizes, "No other British honour gives translated fiction from every language the chance to compete for a general award." The prize of �10,000 will be split into two between writer and translator. Tonkin believes that "no other honour does more to encourage notoriously Anglocentric UK publishers that they should open their doors to global fiction by investing in translation." This new prize opens the way to Egyptian writers who have been translated into English. Thanks to the efforts of the AUS Press, headed by Mark Linz, quite a number of modern Egyptian novels have appeared in English translations. I ask my friend Mark to follow the details of this new prize and -- who knows? -- one of our writers might one day be the proud recipient. One remark caught my attention in Boyd Tonkin's article, namely the creation of two prizes by the Society of Authors, one for a first novelist over the age of 40 and another for fictional debutantes over 60. This shows, according to the writer, that "a talent for fiction can find its true voice at any age." I can vouch safe for this. I have a friend approaching his 70th year who has recently discovered in himself a talent for writing poetry. His love poems especially can stand up to any young Don Juan. I am, personally, hoping to publish a collection of short stories which I started writing at the age of 75 within a few months, and now that I have moved beyond my 80th year, I do hope to start writing my first novel.
