Canadian novelist and essayist John Ralston Saul has won the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, one of South Korea’s most prestigious awards.
The honour puts Mr. Ralston Saul in distinguished company alongside past winners such as Nelson Mandela, Nobel laureate in literature Wole Soyinka, the Dalai Lama, and more recently Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human-rights advocate who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.
"It’s wonderful when something [like this] comes out of nowhere," Mr. Ralston Saul said yesterday evening.
The prizes, awarded each year for peace, literature, social service, art, academic excellence and missionary work, were established in memory of Manhae Han Yong-un, a revered Korean Buddhist poet and political leader who advocated Korean independence from Japan in the early 20th century. They are given for a body of work that honours Han’s ideals of freedom, equality, harmony and love.
For years, Mr. Ralston Saul has been an occasional traveller to South Korea and a keen reader of its writers, particularly the younger generation of authors he describes as "extremely sharp and disturbing."
One of his early visits shaped his Governor General’s Award-winning Massey Lectures, The Unconscious Civilization, which includes "a reflection on how humans could be integrated into a place based on Buddhist buildings that I’d seen." The work received special notice in his citation for the Manhae Prize.
He will travel to South Korea in late August to accept the award.
"This prize, which seems to be their major literary prize, comes out of a Buddhist view of peace and how people can live together, and I think that’s very moving, very humbling," he said. "It’s a very interesting way of coming at public literature."
The author of 10 non-fiction books and five novels, Mr. Ralston Saul has written widely on Western civilizations and their power structures, examining concepts from individualism to democracy. His latest work, A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, argues that Canada is a Métis nation.
Last October, Mr. Ralston Saul became the first Canadian to be named president of International PEN, a worldwide association of writers. He is married to former Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson.
James Bradshaw, The Globe and Mail, March 10, 2010
