Syrian author shares Pinter prize

8 October 2012 Last updated at 19:41 GMT The author has been a vocal critic of President Assad's regime Exiled Syrian author Samar Yazbek is to share this year's Pen Pinter literary prize with poet Carol Ann Duffy.

Yazbek is being recognised for her book A Woman In The Crossfire, which is based on diaries she kept during the early stages of the Syrian conflict.

It details how her outspoken views against President Assad's government led to persecution, and her decision to flee Syria with her young daughter.

Duffy, who is Poet Laureate, was named the winner of the main prize in July.

The annual award - in memory of the playwright Harold Pinter - is given to a British writer of outstanding literary merit.

The winner then chooses a recipient for the Writer Of Courage Award, which recognises an international writer who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs.

Duffy was given a shortlist by the English Pen Writers At Risk Committee, and made her announcement at the British Library on Monday night.

Yazbek said: "I am grateful to English Pen, and to Carol Ann Duffy, for selecting this book, and through it, for supporting our cause."

Lady Antonia Fraser, Harold Pinter's widow, added: "Carol Ann Duffy's recognition of Samar Yazbek's courage in writing about Syria's revolution from the inside could not come at a more appropriate time".

'Raw passion'

Born in 1970, Yazbek comes from the same Alawite clan as President Bashar al-Assad.

Prior to the uprising, she wrote extensively on women's issues in newspapers and journals, while challenging taboos in her novels.

Her second novel Salsal (Clay) cast a critical eye over the power of the military, while Cinnamon - which is due to be published in the UK next month - looks at the social divide in Syria through the prism of a servant who enters into a lesbian relationship with her employer.

When protests against the Syrian government began last March, she voiced her support online. She received hate mail, her family disowned her and, eventually, she was arrested and shown the cells she would be kept in, if she continued to support the rebels.

After further intimidation, she fled to Paris in July 2011 - although she has said: "I return all the time, but in secrecy. Undercover."

Woman In The Crossfire tells the story of the first few months of the uprising, via her own story and testimony from ordinary Syrians.

The Spectator praised the book's "uncompromising reportage from a doomed capital", while the Washington Post said it "brought the cause of the opposition - and its raw human passion for liberation - into focus".

The UN estimates that more than 20,000 people have died in the conflict in Syria, while hundreds of thousands more have fled over the country's borders.

Tensions with neighbouring Turkey have escalated over the last week, after Syrian mortar rounds landed in the Turkish town of Akcakale, killing five.

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Quantum pioneers win Nobel prize

9 October 2012 Last updated at 09:52 GMT Serge Haroche (l) is based at the College de France and David Wineland is based at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology This year's Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to two researchers for their work with light and matter at the most fundamental level.

Serge Haroche of France and David Wineland of the US will share the prize, worth 8m Swedish kronor (£750,000; $1.2m).

Their "quantum optics" work deals with single photons and ions, the basic units of light and matter.

It could lead to advanced modes of communication and computation.

The Nobel citation said the award was for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems".

Light and matter, when the minuscule scales of single particles are reached, behave in surprising ways in a part of physics known as quantum mechanics.

Working with light and matter on this level would have been unthinkable before the pair developed solutions to pick, manipulate and measure photons and ions individually, allowing an insight into a microscopic world that was once just the province of scientific theory.

Their work has implications for light-based clocks far more precise than the atomic clocks at the heart of the world's business systems, and quantum computing, which may - or may not - revolutionise desktop computing as we know it.

But for physicists, the import of the pair's techniques is outlined in a layman's summary on the Nobel site: they preserve the delicate quantum mechanical states of the photons and ions - states that theorists had for decades hoped to measure in the laboratory, putting the ideas of quantum mechanics on a solid experimental footing.

Those include the slippery quantum mechanical ideas of "entanglement" - the seemingly ethereal connection between two distant particles that underpins much work on the "uncrackable codes" of quantum cryptography - and of "decoherence", in which the quantum nature of a particle slowly slips away through its interactions with other matter.

The prize is the second in quantum optics in recent years; the theory behind decoherence formed part of 2005's Nobel physics prize citation.

'Overwhelming'

Prof Haroche was reached by phone from the press conference. He had been told he had won just 20 minutes before telling reporters: "I was lucky - I was in the street and passing near a bench, so I was able to sit down immediately.

Dr Wineland's work uses an "ion trap" in which charged particles are tested using light

"I was walking with my wife going back home and when I saw the... Swedish code, I realised it was real and it's, you know, really overwhelming."

Prof Sir Peter Knight of the UK's Institute of Physics, said: "Haroche and Wineland have made tremendous advances in our understanding of quantum entanglement, with beautiful experiments to show how atomic systems can be manipulated to exhibit the most extraordinary coherence properties."

The Nobel prizes have been given out annually since 1901, covering the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

Speculation had been rife, in light of the discovery of the Higgs boson announced in July, that Peter Higgs or his colleagues may have been in the running for the prize, but historically the prizes tend to honour discoveries after a period of years.

The first-ever Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Wilhelm Roentgen of Germany for his discovery of X-rays, and with this year's winners the total number of recipients has reached 194.

On Monday, the 2012 prize for medicine or physiology was awarded to John Gurdon from the UK and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan for changing adult cells into stem cells, which can become any other type of cell in the body.

This year's chemistry prize will be announced on Wednesday, with the literature and peace prizes to be awarded later in the week.

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