Novelist Megha Majumdar, one of this year's winners of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, has spoken of her love for libraries, not just for reading but for the jigsaw puzzle table in midtown Manhattan and the telescope she borrowed from Brooklyn Public Library to observe the night sky. 'I go often enough that I have favourite places to sit,' she says.
Majumdar won the medal for her novel 'A Guardian and a Thief', a story of a woman's quest to leave India for the United States. Yiyun Li was awarded in nonfiction for her memoir 'Things in Nature Merely Grow', in which she confronts the loss of her two sons. The authors each receive $5,000 and will be honoured at the American Library Association conference in Chicago in June.
Li, 53, a native of Beijing who moved to the US in 2000, recalls that she never saw the inside of a library until middle school, when she became a librarian's assistant, 'a monumental experience'. After moving to the US, she was dazzled by the public library in Ames, Iowa. 'I would walk from shelf to shelf. That's how I discovered A.S. Byatt,' she says.
Li now teaches at Princeton University and gets writing done at the university library. She also likes to visit the public library in town to 'just look at the books and the shelves — language books for immigrants and maps and travel books'. She adds, 'In an alternative life, I could have been a librarian.'
Majumdar, 38, holds memories of libraries in India and the US. In Kolkata, one library was essentially a sidewalk display from which she borrowed stacks of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys novels. In Brooklyn, where she lives, she savours the chance for privacy and community. 'It's a very good feeling to be in a place which affirms that we are welcome there,' she says.
