The first thing the Japanese American author Ruth Ozeki did the morning after winning the Women’s prize for fiction was meditate. “A very short one,” she says when we meet at her hotel later. She was so convinced she wasn’t going to win (Meg Mason and Elif Shafak were the frontrunners) she had planned “a full schedule” for the day. “Not that I’m complaining,” she laughs. Coolly elegant in black, despite the heatwave, the 66-year-old writer has the sort of glow not often seen in post-award ceremony interviews.
Ozeki can surely lay claim to being the first Zen Buddhist priest to take the Women’s prize, which she has won for her fourth novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness. It tells the story of 14-year-old Benny, who starts hearing the voices of everyday objects after his father’s death. His mother, Annabelle, has become a hoarder, and in a sense inanimate things (her husband’s shirts, snow globes, a yellow teapot) are also speaking to her. Clinging to her job as an archivist, Annabelle has let their house overflow with newspaper cuttings: they are metaphorically drowning in grief, garbage and too much news.
