Saturday, October 14, 2006

Kiran Desai

Indian writer Kiran Desai was awarded Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize on October 10 for "The Inheritance of Loss," a cross-continental saga that moves from the Himalayas to New York City.

Desai, daughter of novelist and 3-time Booker Prize nominee, Anita Desai, had been one of the favorites for the 50,000 pound prize.

"To my mother I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine," said Desai as she accepted her award.

Judges deliberated for 2 hours before making their decision, hailing Desai's work as "a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness."

"The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance- of V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan and Salman Rushdie- but she does something pioneering," said Hermione Lee, chairman of the judges.

35-year-old Kiran, the youngest ever female recipient of the prize, held off the challenge of 5 other nominees, including the favorite, Sarah Waters, and her novel "The Night Watch," a story of love and loss during World War II. Other finalists were "In The Country Of Men," Hisham Matar's semi-autobiographical first novel about childhood in Moammar Gadhafi's Libya; "The Secret River," Kate Grenville's tale of life in a 19th-century Australian penal colony; "Carry Me Down," the story of an unusual boy, by Irish-Australian novelist M.J. Hyland; and "Mother's Milk," a portrait of a rich but dysfunctional family by English writer Edward St. Aubyn.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Johansson was recently in news for chosen as the "Sexiest Woman Alive" by magazine Esquire.

The 21-year-old actress poses in come-hither garb on the cover of the magazine's November issue, on newsstands October 18.

Johansson, whose screen credits include "The Black Dahlia," "Lost in Translation" and "Match Point," says she would rather be admired for attributes other than sex appeal. "What about my brain? What about my heart? What about my kidneys and my gallbladder?" she asks, addressing all the hoopla about her curves in an interview in the magazine.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Tatana Kucharova

Tatana Kucharova, an 18-year-old student from Czech Republic, won the Miss World 2006 beauty contest on September 30.

Kucharova defeated 103 other women in voting among a panel of judges and from television viewers around the world during a 2-hour finals ceremony in Poland capital Warsaw. First runner-up in the 56th edition of the annual beauty pageant was Joana Valentina Boitor, a 17-year-old from Romania. Australia's Sabrina Houssami, 20, was 3rd.

Wearing a long white dress, a teary Kucharova blew kisses to the 2,500-strong audience in Warsaw's Congress Hall after she received her diamond crown from Miss World 2005, Unnur Birna Vilhjalmsdottir of Iceland.

Kucharova, a tall high-school student with long blond hair, was born in Trnava and grew up in the town of Opocno. She told the judges that she wants to attend university and then become a model. She likes tennis and horse riding and her personal motto is "Always be an optimist."

The organizers of the pageant said this year's finals offered the widest-ever participation of voters around the world via the Internet. Votes were also submitted in text messages sent from mobile phones.

Latest On Mediabharti.com

मीडियाभारती.कॉम (हिंदी) पर...

Your Ad Here