SRI Lankan-born author Michael Ondaatje and Jamaica Kinkaid. who was born In Antigua, won prizes for best foreign novels awarded Monday by France's literary Juries.

Ondaatje won Hie (Tlx Medicis for "Le Fantome d'Anll" (Anil's Ghost) and Kincaid the Prix Femina award for Mon Frere" (My Brother).

The Mediclsjury awarded its top prize to Yann Apperry for hls novel "Diabolus in Muslca," while lhe Femina Jury crowned Camille Laurens for "Dans ces bras-la" (In those arms).

Ondaatje, who reached a world audience with die filming of hls novel The English Patient ; returns to the land of hls child hood In hls latest novel in which he tells the story of a young doctor sent by the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights to work In the war-zone of the strife-torn Island.

Born in 1943 in what was then the British colony of Ceylon. Ondaatje Is now a naturalised Canadian living in Toronto.

The novel "The English Patient" won Britain's top literary award, the Booker Prize. In 1992. while Its screened version went or i to win nine Oscars.

"Anil's Ghost" Is the second novel In which Ondaatje has written about Sri Lanka but Ure first In which he has dealt with the civil war that has riven the Island since the 1980s.

"I didn't know the war at first hand ... but I was obsessed by this conflict taking place in lhe country where 1 grew up," he told the Canadian media last September.

Tire novel has already sold 28,000 copies in France.

Kincaid, who has lived in the United States for the past 30 years, Ipok the story of her brother s fight against AIDS as the basis for her novel.

Born Ellane Potter Richardson. Kincaid left her native Antigua at the age of 18. Her first Job was working as an au pair girl, and she went on to become a writer on the magazine New Yorker before publishing her first novel Annie John in 1985 to massive critical acclaim, including tributes from Salman Rushdie.

Now 51. Kincaid said she was deeply honoured, grateful and surprised" at receiving the Femina award.

She said that If she had an Ideal audience, "it would be either French or German. Because ... people still take literature seri-

ously in places like that.

"In literature, you always risk something, you risk offending somebody, especially the powerful. I don't think a lot of American literature does that.

' I always write about things that are happening to me. ... My brother was dying of AIDS and I wrote about It because I wanted to understand it better. And I wrote hoping that people where he lived might read it and might learn something about themselves."

In hls third novel, the 28-year-old Apperry recounts the story of a young boy who is brought up by hls drunken, vlo-

lent father and saved by hls love of music.

Laurens, whose heroine describes her life through the men she has known, from her father to her child, draws her title from a song by Guy Beart.

Other awards announced Monday Included the Femina essay prize awarded to former Justice minister Robert Badinter for "L'Abolition", in which he recounts his long struggle for the death penalty to be abolished (he succeeded In 1981) and the Medicis essay prize awarded to Armelle Lebras-Chopard for Le Zoo des Philosophes".

Last week, France s top literary prize the Goncourt was awarded to Jean-Jacques Schuhl for Ingrid Caven” which narrowly beat' Allah n est pas oblige' (Allah doesn l have to) by the Ivory Coast-bom novelist Ahmadou Kourou ma.

However Kourouma's novel won what is generally considered Die runner s up award, the Prix Renaudot.

—AFP