Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize

The visit

5 May 2007

I get in the car, and as it speeds off, I turn around to gaze at my father, mother and Second Sister, huddled against the gate, a little triangle waving at the disappearing vehicle. They look small and weak, and they get smaller and smaller and weaker.

I clutch at the handle of the window. I smile, I wave. My hand is shaking and I find I can no longer be still. My heart whispers the same thing again and again, familiarly and frantically. It is a mantra or a prayer, depending on where you come from.

‘Be careful, be careful. Oh god, please be careful.’

Clarissa Tan can be contacted at tan.clarissa@gmail.com.

The Shiva Naipaul memorial prize, which is in its final year, is awarded annually to the contestant best able, like the late Shiva Naipaul, to describe a visit to a foreign place or people. It is not for travel writing in the conventional sense, but for the most acute and profound observation of a culture evidently alien to the writer. This year the prize is worth £3,000.

The judges were the writers William Boyd and James Knox, Matthew d’Ancona (editor of The Spectator), Mark Amory (literary editor of The Spectator) and Mary Wakefield (assistant editor of The Spectator).

Six were shortlisted out of a total of 90 entries. The runners-up were Grainne Hayes, Daniel Belsky, Simon Akam and Minoo Dinshaw. The judges particularly admired Kapka Kassabova’s piece about Belogradchik in Bulgaria, but Clarissa Tan emerged as the winner by a clear margin.