CONGRATULATIONS & CELEBRATIONS

It's turning out to be the season of awards. And it's always great when friends make waves.

If you happen to watch a certain news channel closely at a certain hour in the morning, you already know her.

If you don't, great. Read on to discover some of the joys of being on and off camera. For a moment, go back to your early hour. Do you lumber out of bed at 5am or is it 6am or 7am? Pick your time. Whenever you do, don't you get that cuppa coffee or tea or lime with honey? Then don't you want your news fix? You possibly pick the paper or reach out for that remote.

There you are sitting in your little nook, perhaps hearing the birds chirp, the sun rise, the water flow, the day begin.

Here she is making it all seem like a breeze.

All poised, pretty and in control, her warm smile fills up your screen and you think it's easy.

She never gives you the slightest hint of the frosty studio where temperatures are constantly set at the jaw shuddering 16 degrees. When she's on set, the camera and her co-host are all she has for company. A live show gives her virtually no breaks. And that's after waking up at the crack of dawn to look perfect on set.

Yes, there's an army/a team/an orchestra of sorts behind ensuring everything that goes out is a picture of perfection..

On a normal day, it's all smooth sailing. Then the news breaks, the messages race full speed ahead. Lots of voices speak simultaneously in her ear piece but when you are watching it, you never get a whiff of it.

Even during the normal news days, she goes through several interviews, sussing out the temperament of the guest in the couple of minutes they get to chat. She can flit from English to Korean to English in a jiffy. And over the years that she's been on the show, we've heard so many South Korean voices we normally wouldn't have.

If you think doing an interview in English is a lot of work, try grappling with full length interviews in another language. Before the shoot, comes the research, then the cameras roll, then the language and when you head back, its the transcribing, the supering, the timing. You would think its not a presenters job, yet she has been more than willing to take it on.

Her commitment has spoken louder than any of the words I attempt to pen can. That's possibly why she got one of the first interviews with now UN Chief Ban Ki Moon. It didn't matter that she was on vacation, the story came first.

That's Suzanne Jung for you - commitment above everything else. That explains the formal recognition and a lot more that is bound to follow. She received one of South Korea's top civilian honours - the Prime Minister's Citation. Among other things, she has been credited with "helping promote the awareness and the image of South Korea."

Her interviews have always left me enlightened, wanting to know more about a country I dream of visiting someday.

Till that happens, I'll say congratulations.....
And if you haven't seen her already, you know who to tip your hat to next.

Here's looking at you Suzanne....

OVERDUE BUT

I've been out of the blogosphere and pretty much every other sphere for the past couple of weeks. No, I wasn't on the road again, just the usual demands on one's life. Yes, these are lame excuses, yet a possible/logical explanation for the over-due congratulatory post.

Those of you who have followed Amit Varma's lucid prose, the news of the award that is his, will come as no surprise. For those of you who haven't read his work yet, India Uncut is the perfect place to start.

The Bastiat Prize for Journalism is his. Yes, that candlestick beats the cash. Though Amit fielded off competition from 280 other scribes. With that, he joins the select ranks of past winners Tim Harford (Financial Times), Mary Anastasia O’Grady (Wall Street Journal) and Robert Guest (The Economist).

For a closer look at what the contest was like, head here and don't forget giving Amit that well-deserved email pat.

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Closer home, congratulations are also (over)due to Balli Kaur. She's sitting comfortably in her lovely little room at the University of East Anglia in UK as I pen this. All thanks to the prestigious T K Wong fellowship that Balli won to work on her first novel.

She sent me an excerpt of the writing that helped her clinch the award and it sure has me pining for more:


Six weeks later, Amrit left the house in the middle of the night and didn’t return. Narin was the last to know because he had become so difficult to reach. It took a phone call from his father to the Dean, who sent a resident advisor to tell him in person........

As he packed his room for his return home, he pulled out the suitcase from under his bed. Thoughts of Amrit, her body mangled and abandoned somewhere flooded his mind and made it hard for him to focus. His hands shook as he unzipped the suitcase. There were things in there that he could throw out to make room for what he had acquired in America. Shot glasses. Photographs. Movies on video that were never released back home. A clock radio.

Tears stung his eyes as he emptied the suitcase. He never expected the smells of his home to remain so well-preserved in this bag. Sandalwood and fennel drifted into the hard winter air and tinted the iron skies a rich orange. The coldness evaporated and in its place, a blast of warmth. Then Narin saw his thick-soled shoes. Amrit had done most of the last minute packing. Probably out of mischief, she’d removed the shoes from his other suitcase and placed them in this one. Narin didn’t care how loudly he was crying – it was the first and last time he would do such a thing for his sister and in all the years after, he would be reticent. Fellow students peered anxiously from the doorway asking if he needed anything but he would only stop grieving when he picked up the shoes and found them sitting flatly on a dictionary, a Holy Book and a popular novel.

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Balli had appeared on the show shortly before she packed her bags for the UK together with Chris Mooney-Singh, the brains behind Writers Connect and author Richard Lord.

Chris started the group in June 2004 for writers to give and get feedback on each others' work. Over the years, its grown slowly yet surely. And Balli's success is clear proof. She discussed some of her writing at the sessions the group has held at the Earshot Café @The Arts House.

Chris and his lovely wife Savinder have been in the news recently. And its fantastic to see two wonderful people get the attention they truly deserve.

THIS JUST IN....

Penguin's Loi Zhi Wei breaks this to me almost matter of factly....
"Penguin has just been crowned Publisher of the Year at the British Book Industry Awards, also known as The Nibbles. These are the Oscars of the British publishing business - and the verdict of the judges was unanimous and resounding. It was a collective triumph for all our UK publishers - Penguin, DK and Travel - and caps a remarkable year. Simon Prosser and Hamish Hamilton jointly won Editor and Imprint of the Year and, to round off a great night, we were voted the Marketing Campaign of the Year for Freakonomics."

I'm delighted and certainly not surprised. Penguin has a solid team backing its books in this part of the world. And so many of their books are simply great. Their logo may have gone from fat to slim, but that hasn't hit the quality of the product which simply keeps getting better.

Though it's one thing to represent great books, great authors, outstanding publishers quite another to generate interest in the titles. Take a look at the number of books that get released everyday. They grapple for shelf space, blog space, print space and air time. Having spent a couple of months in the book trade, I know for a fact that dealing with the sheer range of titles is mind-blogging as well as challenging. A great book store manager, quite like a good editor, has the knack for picking the lead, the best titles, the one's with the maximum content. They are the ones who scour through the pages of the Publishers Weekly, Guardian, The New York Times and everything else that has a credible reputation when it comes to all things literary.

That's pretty much what great publicists do as well. And I've the fortune of working with so many of them in the past two and a half years. Zhi Wei, in fact, was one of my first contacts when I was sending out random emails on the proposed launch of Off The Shelf. She responded, we met for coffee, she brought a whole lot of brochures and some titles. I thought I'd get snowed, but I wasn't. Over the course of the afternoon, we were engaging in discussions about books that had moved, books we were looking forward to, authors whose work we'd come to love. And it was amazing to see someone in the trade driven by so much passion for the written word. We've covered and strengthened that middle ground over the years.

I've had similar experiences with Sadie-Jane of Pansing, Pamela Fahey (who has now branched out on her own), Aria Ting of Marshall-Cavendish and Yani, formerly of MPH.

Each of them know their product. They have their pulse on the market. They know exactly how much to push. Too much and you risk losing it, too little and chances are the title might go unnoticed.

They do their reading. Their releases are a treasure trove of information and invariably give you something more than the standard google search. More than all of that, they feel for their books and they always like to go unnoticed. Not anymore....

A BOOKER BY ANY OTHER NAME

It's becoming increasingly tough to keep track of the Booker.

Nominees have just been announced for the Man Booker International Prize. Lest, you think what you are thinking, don't confuse this with the Man Booker Prize. The one that gave us our literary inheritance back by honouring Kiran Desai.

What's the difference, you may ask? Isn't a Man Booker or a Booker by any other name the prestigious literary award - the one that catapults books into bestsellers, makes the prize-winning authors the toast of the literatti and the gliteratti.

Subtle differences exist. If you were to read the fine print the Man Booker International Prize sets itself apart from its other famous predecessor by looking at work from fiction writers of any nationality. The only criteria - the work should be written in or translated into English. The 60,000-pound award is presented every two years to highlight a living writer's continued contribution to fiction on the world stage.

So what can you expect?

The names you've heard so many times before. That pretty much makes up for the 15 finalists. Among others there's Salman Rushdie sharing the long list with Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, John Banville, Philip Roth, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje.

The inaugural prize in 2005 was awarded to Ismail Kadare, so could it be Carlos Fuentes this time round? Find out in early June. That's when the panel of judges make their pronouncements.

If you are into award-tracking, it isn't too long a wait for the Pulitzer Prize though. They will be announced on April 17th, with the awards ceremony slated for May 22nd. Yup, the award season has only just begun.