First time novelist Aravind Adiga from India has won the Booker Prize worth 50,000 UK pounds (around 100,000 US dollars) and stated on BBC Radio that it won't change his life.
Oh Puhleeze.... Am I alone in thinking that this statement displays an extraordinary poverty of imagination?
What is he thinking? He's a first time author, and his book has just won what is possibly the world's most prestigious literary prize. That alone pretty much guarantees that his life won't be the way that it was, or would have been without it. Or maybe I'm missing something...
Maybe his face is usually filling TV screens and newspapers.
Maybe he's used to having a nice big pot of money in the bank.
Maybe he'd already sewn up his next few publishing deals, and had a guarantee in his contract that his books would be promoted and piled high in all the bookstores.
Then yup, you can certainly see how winning a massive literary prize wouldn't affect your life much.
Apparently his book centres on a man who dreams of rising up from his simple life as a teashop worker and driver, and bettering himself. What would that take, I wonder? Clearly a lot more than a bank account full of money and instant international fame, if its author is anything to go by...
