‘The Beekeeper Of Aleppo’ Wins 2020 Aspen Words Literary Prize

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courtesy of the Aspen Words Literary Prize

Courtesy of the Aspen Words Literary Prize

Christy Lefteri grew up in the shadow of injury. Her parents fled Cyprus after the turkish invasion in 1974, and though the Cypriot refugees finally made it to the United Kingdom, they could n’t help but bring their pain with them. “ When my dad ultimately got to the U.K., my grandma said she did n’t recognize him and he had ‘blood in his eyes, ‘ “ Lefteri recalls. “ I do n’t know if his eyes were bloodshot — or if she saw something in his eyes that she did n’t recognize. ” Lefteri won the third annual Aspen Words Literary Prize on Thursday, which, in partnership with NPR, awards $ 35,000 for illuminating a “ vital contemporary issue ” in fiction. Her winning novel, The Beekeeper of Aleppo, traces the way of a pair of refugees whose lives have been shattered by the years-long war in Syria, and who have little hope to guide them but a cousin who awaits them in the U.K. Lefteri beat out a short list of finalists that besides included Nicole Dennis-Benn, Valeria Luiselli, Bryan Washington and Brian Allen Carr. By doing thus, she adds her list to a list of Aspen winners that features Mohsin Hamid and Tayari Jones .

And she tells NPR that her win has not just brought her joy, though there surely has been gladden. She has besides felt a seeping kind of gloominess since she learned in private last week, remembering the refugees who inspired her novel — not merely her parents, but besides the people whom she met respective years ago in Athens, where she says she volunteered at a refugee accompaniment center.

“ I knew that I could get on a plane and come back to London whenever I wanted. But those people that I met — those fantastic people were stuck in Athens, and they did n’t know where they were going to end up, ” says Lefteri, who was raised and is based in the U.K. “ I think winning this award is so stimulate, it ‘s such a fantastic thing, and at the same fourth dimension, it reminds me of those things that I feel indeed stormily about that necessitate to change in the populace. ” That ‘s part of the idea of the pry. First awarded in 2018 by Aspen Words, a nonprofit organization literary focus on with the Aspen Institute, the respect seeks to recognize fabrication writers who do n’t shy from the messy — much afflictive — realities of the worldly concern. In this class ‘s crop of finalists, for exemplify, writers grappled with the effects of poverty, racial injustice, American immigration policy and the opioid crisis in the U.S .

But there was something about Lefteri ‘s influence, ultimately, that set it apart in judges ‘ eyes. “ We see wars on our screens and cross paths with the survivors in newly lives in our neighborhoods, but we do n’t see them, ” Esmeralda Santiago, who served on the prize jury, said in her citation. “ Lefteri brings us closer so we can, without fear. ” The notion of distance is a salient one. Lefteri says the undertake to bridge the distance she felt from the syrian refugees whose voices inspired her novel was a constant contend for her in composing it. After returning from the center and beginning bring on the book, for example, she turned repeatedly to her Arabic coach, Ibrahim, a native of Aleppo himself, for guidance on a forcible layout of a city that continued war prevented her from visiting herself.

And her sense of haunting distance, in outer space and time, in empathy and emotion, from her church father ‘s bury memories and the physical danger of Syria, helped drive her desire to compose the book. “ even though I know the pain that my parents went through, somehow in my heed it ‘s however confined to a different time. I think sometimes we get so accustomed to thinking that danger exists elsewhere, that other people are going to suffer, ” she says. “ I have n’t lived through a war, so I could n’t possibly know enough about it, but I tried to put myself in the shoes of those characters deoxyadenosine monophosphate much as I could, ” she adds, “ so that there was n’t that kind of distance between the proofreader and the suffer of these people, their hopes and their dreams. ”