Jesse Ball`s `strange and beautiful` Census wins Gordon Burn prize
(The Guardian Culture News)

Judges praise fable inspired by the author´s late brother as perfect match for prize´s ambition to reward writing `that dares to enter history´A fable inspired by the author Jesse Ball´s late brother, who had Down´s syndrome, has won the Gordon Burn prize.The American author´s Census, which follows a terminally ill father and his son as they conduct a survey of a nameless country, beat works including Guy Gunaratne´s Booker-longlisted novel In Our Mad and Furious City to the £5,000 award at the Durham book festival on Thursday evening. The prize is for work that follows in the footsteps of Burn - `novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past; non-fiction adventurous enough to inhabit characters and events in order to create new and vivid realities` - and has been won in the past by writers including Paul Kingsnorth and Benjamin Myers. Continue reading...