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BMTimes >> Literary News
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Sunday, November 22, 2009
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Geoffrey Chaucer's sloppy scrivener unmasked after 600 years
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After more than 600 years, his handwriting that gave him away. The identity of a medieval scribe - who until the last weekend was known to literary history only as Adam the scrivener - and whose carelessness was the cause of such vexation for Geoffrey Chaucer that the poet threatened to curse him with an outbreak of scabs, was discovered through some extraordinarily alert academic detective work.
The sloppy copyist of the words of the father of English literature was revealed to be one Adam Pinkhurst, son of a small Surrey landowner during the 14th century.
The revelation of his name and some of his background, announced by Cambridge University, has caused intense excitement and admiration among specialists in the subject. It indirectly helps to authenticate the two most authoritative texts of Chaucer's great work, the Canterbury Tales, the first long poem written in an approximation to modern English.
It also discloses the scribe as the writer of an elegiac reference in the text of the tales to the fact that Chaucer had died before completing them.
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Caine prize winner announced
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This year's 'African Booker' has been won by Brian Chikwava from Zimbabwe, it was announced today. He is the first writer from the country to receive the award.
The Caine Prize for African Writing, which is worth $15,000 (£9,000), is awarded to a short story published in English by an African writer whose work has reflected African sensibilities.
Chikwava's story, Seventh Street Alchemy, was praised by the judges' chairman, Alvaro Ribeiro, as "a triumph for the long tradition of Zimbabwean writing in the face of Zimbabwe's uncertain future."
He added that the story was marked out by "a very strong narrative in which Brian Chikwava of Zimbabwe claims the English language as his own."
The 32-year-old writer and musician was born in Bulawayo but grew up in Harare, where he performed regularly at the Book Cafe's poetry evenings and discussions. He studied at Bristol University and currently lives in south London.
Chikwava said he was very pleased but also surprised at his win. "I'm in shock," he said. "A few months ago it was not something I had in my blood at all. My head is spinning - it's very exciting.
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Bars fight to be anointed Papa's local of choice
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In life, Hemingway liked good sport. He certainly enjoyed a good drink. So the author would probably have enjoyed the row that has erupted between two bars in Key West, both of which are claiming to be his favourite drinking joint.
The Guardian reports that forty-three years after his death, the owners are at odds over which is the "original Sloppy Joe's," the reputed preferred watering hole of the Nobel Prize-winner during the 12 years he lived in Florida.
At stake is £5.4m in marketing and merchandising rights.
Chris Mullins, chief executive of Sloppy Joe's Bar, has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the owners of the neighbouring Captain Tony's Saloon, demanding they cease describing their pub as the original. "We just want to protect our marque," Mr Mullins said. "Sloppy Joe's is world famous, Captain Tony's is not."
But locals say both are right - that the first Sloppy Joe's opened in a former morgue on the site now occupied by Captain Tony's in 1933, but that Hemingway, known to regulars as Papa, drank in both and even bankrolled landlord "Sloppy" Joe Russell's move to the new location in 1937.
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