Gillian Maitland Summer Percussion Seminar, National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and Edinburgh Youth Orchestra, as well as winning many music competitions and awards for her exceptional abilities on the marimba. Throughout Maitland's education, she has racked up some single and long term lessons with some of the worlds most renowned percussionists. These include Dame Evelyn Glennie, Ney Rosauro, Kai Stensgaard, Joseph Gramley, Janis Potter, Nick Petrella as well as members of the percussion section of the New York Philharmonic. In 2005, after performing marimba to the G8 Wives at Glamis Castle and winning the award of Angus Youth Ambassador, Maitland won an
The World Is What It Is in 1996. The biography has been extensively reviewed: the reviewers include Paul Theroux, who wrote an earlier book about Naipaul. The biography was selected by the editors of the "New York Times Book Review" as one of the "Times"' "10 Best Books of 2008". It won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, and the British literary award the Hawthornden Prize. The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in