Rohinton Mistry, a Canadian-Indian writer, will be the 2012 laureate of the $50,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
The honor is sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, the Neustadt family and Open University’s international magazine World Literature Today. The Neustadt Prize, is a biennial award and is said to be the only international literary award for which poets, playwrights and novelists are given equal consideration.
Mistry is the author of Such a Long Journey (1991), winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize; A Fine Balance (1996) and Family Matters (2002). His latest book, The Scream, was illustrated by Tony Urquhart (2008).
The Neustadt Prize is often called the “American Nobel” because 28 of its laureates, candidates or jurors in the past 41 years have won a Nobel Prize in literature following their involvement with the Neustadt Prize. However unlike the Nobel which is awarded for an individual piece of work, the Neustadt is awarded for the entire body of work by the writer.
Previous Neustadt winners are Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia), Raja Rao (India/United States) , Assia Djebar (Algeria), David Malouf (Australia) among others.