News from the Web

Author discusses possibility of chemotherapy, as well as fan letters he's been sending to other writers

Iain Banks, who announced his diagnosis with gall bladder cancer in April, has posted another update to fans, in which he ruminates on everything from his new car to the possibility of chemotherapy.

The bestselling Scottish novelist has been the recipient of an outpouring of goodwill and support from his readers since he told them in early April that he was "officially very poorly". In a new message to fans, posted online yesterday, he said that his bilirubin level is continuing to fall, and that he has an appointment for a CT scan at the end of the month.

"If my bilirubin is below 50 – and if the tumours have behaved themselves – then chemotherapy will be an option, with these new CT results forming the base line for measuring the improvements chemo might provide," wrote Banks. "If the scan shows the tumours have been over-enthusiastic during the last couple of months, then – as I understand it – chemo would be pointless. Assuming it is an option I'll probably try chemo and see how I react, but if it wipes me out each time I shan't be persevering."

In the meantime, as well as fitting in a holiday on "(mostly) sunny" Barra, Banks has been letting other writers and artists know what they mean to him, with "what was basically a fan letter" sent to Alasdair Gray, "telling him how much his work has meant to me", and "something very similar" conveyed to M John Harrison.

He has also – after six years car-free to reduce his "carbon hoof-print" – bought a six-year-old BMW M5, "so I am back to scudding round the Highland roads again with a big grin on my fizzog (well, when I can grin, and the acceleration/braking force isn't distorting my face like somebody taking part in an early Nasa rocket sled experiment)".

And he is continuing to read the posts left for him by fans on the site, and is "still knocked out by the love and the depth of feeling coming from so many people". "Thank you, all of you," he said. "A few posts with unlikely-sounding cures get skimmed and an even smaller number skipped, following mention of one or more religious Arooga! terms, but together they account for less than one percent of the total."

Banks said he wished he could reply to everyone individually, but he doesn't have the time, so will only comment if there is something factually wrong mentioned. "So far the only point I can remember is one where an ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he's just misremembered, as this has never been the case," wrote Banks.

"Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn't letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can't imagine that I'd have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round. And … rant over."

The author's new novel, The Quarry, is out on 20 June and is, according to its publisher, "a virtuoso performance whose soaring riffs on the inexhaustible marvel of human perception and rage against the dying of the light will stand among Iain Banks's greatest work".

• Iain Banks
• Fiction
• Science fiction
• Cancer

'Mesmeric' storytelling of The Detour secures £10,000 purse, shared with translator David Colmer

Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker's "haunting" story of a Dutch scholar who retreats to a Welsh farmhouse after an affair has won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize.

Bakker, who took the €100,000 Impac prize for his debut novel The Twin, narrowly beat Argentinian author Andrés Neuman to win the Independent award for The Detour. The award goes to the best work of contemporary fiction in translation and has been won in the past by José Saramago and Orhan Pamuk. Judges including the novelists Elif Shafak and Gabriel Josipovici were won over by its themes of "infidelity, exile and isolation", they said.

Bakker, who works as a gardener as well as writing fiction, said that "to win so unexpectedly was so wonderful". He also beat Man Booker International prize winner Ismail Kadare to take this year's award. "The prize is good because it means sales, and sales mean money for plants for my garden," he said.

The Detour is the story of Emilie, an Emily Dickinson scholar who flees to Wales after an affair. A young man ends up staying with her to help out in her remote farmhouse, while in Amsterdam her husband enlists a detective to find her. John Burnside's review in the Guardian called it "even more powerful" than its "accomplished" predecessor, The Twin. "The Detour is a beautiful, oddly moving work of fiction, a quiet read that lingers long in the mind, like the ghosts that linger in our homes, and in the land around us," he wrote.

Independent literary editor and judge of the prize Boyd Tonkin said the novel was "swift-moving and apparently straightforward, but with mysterious hidden depths". "The Detour is a novel that grips its reader tight and never lets go," he said. "Gerbrand Bakker's tale of a Dutch woman who goes missing from her own troubled life and seeks refuge in rural Wales combines mesmeric storytelling with an uncanny sense of place, and an atmosphere of brooding, irresistible menace. In David Colmer's pitch-perfect and immersive translation, this book will both linger in your imagination and, quite possibly, haunt your dreams as well."

"I've been to North Wales often, I know the land, and I'd always thought I would like to write something about it," said Bakker. "But you need more. And then the three things came together – the Emily Dickinson poem, "Ample Make This Bed", which is the motto, and this Dutchwoman, sitting in a completely strange landscape. That was the moment I realised I could write it. I like quiet environments – then things start to happen. If I set a novel in a big city, maybe nothing would happen – it doesn't inspire me."

Bakker will share his £10,000 prize money with the novel's translator, David Colmer. "It's only fitting, that a narrative centred on a Dutch woman in a foreign country, around language and translation, is honoured by the Independent Foreign Fiction prize," said Antonia Byatt, director of Arts Council England, which funds the prize. "It lingers in the mind and the emotions long after reading it, like all compelling and complex stories. The sensitive translation from the original Dutch by David Colmer complements a deeply moving novel."

• Independent foreign fiction prize
• Fiction
• Awards and prizes

Ancient manuscripts on science and history are symbols of Africa's cultural heritage, say guardians of priceless library

There is a proverb in Timbuktu, the legendary medieval city in Mali's desert, that says: "The ink of a scholar is more precious than the blood of a martyr."

What Ahmed Baba, the 16th-century intellectual who said it, would make of recent developments is hard to imagine. At the multimillion-dollar Timbuktu institute bearing his name, fragments of ancient texts litter the corridors. The charred remains of not just scholarly ink, but the antique leather-bound covers that protected them against the harsh desert elements are blown by the hot Saharan wind.

During the last days of the Islamist occupation of northern Mali, the al-Qaida-linked groups who seized control of the territory for almost nine months turned on the Ahmed Baba Institute. In what many people believe was a final act of revenge, and a senseless crime against some of Islam's greatest treasures, they set the manuscripts alight.

"When the French started bombing, [the Islamists] set the manuscripts on fire as they were leaving," said Abdoulaye Cissé, interim director of the institute. "Even after most had fled the town, a small group of jihadists returned to make sure that the fire was still burning."

"We are all Muslims, and in Timbuktu our practical version of Islam has existed for centuries," added Cissé, a native of the city who remained there throughout the occupation.

"But they practise an archaic Islam and do not consider these writings as the authentic Qur'an because they cover not only religion but science, astronomy, history and literature. That's their ideology and we don't support it."

Cissé, who wears a distinctive silver ring engraved with an Islamic blessing that he had to remove under Islamist rule, foresaw that Timbuktu's occupiers could target his precious charge. He and colleagues in Bamako, along with guards at the institute, th e nightwatchman and his son, and numerous co-operative drivers and boatmen, worked for months by night, carefully packing most of the institute's 45,000 manuscripts and ferreting them away by road or pirogue boat to the capital in the south.

"It was a dangerous thing to do, we would have been punished if we had been caught," said Cissé.

"But people really came together to help us. Every time we told them what they were carrying, they all kept it secret and kept them hidden until they left the occupied area."

These ancient manuscripts, which could number up to 400,000 across the region, are a source of pride in Mali – and across sub-Saharan Africa. As Africa gained independence from European colonial powers, the texts – the oldest of which date from the ninth century – became a means for the pan-African movement to refute racist notions of a primitive, unlettered continent with no written history.

"People think that African history is oral, that the blacks were not writing until the white man arrived in Africa," said Cissé. "But we know written literature. That is our mission – to one day recreate the history of Africa through the knowledge contained in those manuscripts."

Timbuktu, which is now a Unesco world heritage site, was founded in about AD1103 and flourished as a commercial hub of the caravan trade between black Africa and the Maghreb, Mediterranean and Middle East. The Ahmed Baba Institute, opened with much fanfare by the former South African president Thabo Mbeki in 2009, has just received about £65,000 in funding from Saudi Arabia to digitise its manuscripts.

"We want to digitally secure all the manuscripts before they are brought back to Timbuktu," said Cissé. "But then they must be brought back. The manuscripts are meaningless if they're not in Timbuktu."

An unintended consequence of the Islamist occupation of the city has been a renewed global focus on the priceless manuscripts, which although mostly written in Arabic also include centuries-old writings in Greek, Latin, French, English and German.

But while the Ahmed Baba Institute is painstakingly working to preserve preserving this history, other manuscripts in Timbuktu are faring less well.

In a narrow, sandy street in the central Badjinde quarter, Kunta Sidi Bouya climbs a steep flight of cracked, mud-cement stairs to a special prayer room on his roof. He lifts half a dozen worn, fraying books from a shelf in the corner, bound exquisitely in antique and decaying leather, and lays them out on the rug on the floor.

Bouya's home contains one of Timbuktu's thousands of private manuscript collections, texts written by the family's ancestors and handed down through the generations.

"My ancestor, Sheikh Sidi al-Bekaye, was a scholar who lived hundreds of years ago, he wrote these," Bouya said proudly. "It feels special when you read something your own grandfathers have written. These are part of our family and they are private.

"You are only allowed to handle them when you have attained a certain level of Qur'anic education. Being able to read Arabic is not enough – you have to learn to understand them completely."

Bouya, 35, a teacher at a Qur'anic school in Timbuktu, said he feared for the safety of his family's manuscripts during the occupation.

"The jihadists attacked and destroyed the shrine to one of my ancestors and we feared they would come for the manuscripts," he said. "But in the end they never came door to door looking for them."

Life was complicated under Islamist rule, Bouya said, and they were happy when the French liberated the town. But now his manuscripts face another, older challenge.

"We fear for their survival. They are old and they are suffering from the elements here," Bouya admitted. "We try to touch them as little as possible and when people come here asking to see them to do research, we hide them to protect them."

Unesco said the plethora of private family manuscripts posed a huge challenge to efforts to conserve Mali's cultural heritage.

"Something has gone wrong with Mali's documentary heritage," said David Stehl of Unesco. "There have been various programmes for their conservation but they have not created the conditions to adequately protect the manuscripts. They have lacked transparency and co-ordination.

"Even the legal question of who owns these private manuscripts is unclear. You have hundreds and thousands of them right across Mali and they are very much tied to families and private owners. We are concerned about the degree to which they were handled during the Islamist occupation – people started touching them, dispersing them and, especially for those that were moved to Bamako, they've now been exposed to completely different climatic conditions.

"Something has to be done to protect these collections, but it is a huge task – monstrous actually."

Preserving the manuscripts is crucial, experts in Mali say, not just to learn about the past, but also the future.

"We have not even begun to exploit the knowledge included in these manuscripts," said Cissé.

"Translation is not enough – we need specialists to analyse and interpret them. They are full of parables, hidden messages, images – all of which take specialists to understand. Only then can we understand the practical value of this wisdom that was written down hundreds of years ago."

• Mali
• Africa
• Heritage
• Arab and Middle East unrest
• United Nations
• Unesco
• Libraries