Coetzee wins second book award

The South African writer J M Coetzee has won the Commonwealth Writer's prize with his novel, Disgrace.

The novel was also awarded the recent Booker Prize.

And for both awards, Mr Coetzee was chosen over the British author Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Mr Rushdie was in the audience at the award ceremony in Delhi.

It was his first visit to India since the late Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini imposed a fatwa against him for his l989 novel, The Satanic Verses, which he held to be blasphemous. Several hundred Muslims demonstrated outside the award ceremony, despite a recent Iranian declaration that the fatwa should be cancelled.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service