Dutch Gardener Wins IMPAC

The IMPAC Dublin Prize, the world's richest literary award, has been won by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker with his debut novel The Twin.

The synopsis of the novel reads :

When Helmer’s twin brother dies in a car accident, he is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother’s role and spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow’.

After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies.

The panel of judges, which this year included Anne Fine, commented :

Though rich in detail, it’s a sparely written story, with the narrator’s odd small cruelties, laconic humour and surprising tendernesses emerging through a steady, well-paced, unaffected style. ... The book convinces from first page to last. With quiet mastery the story draws in the reader. The writing is wonderful: restrained and clear, and studded with detail of farm rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch countryside. The author excels at dialogue, and Helmer’s inner story-telling voice also comes over perfectly as he begins to change everything around him. There are intriguing ambiguities, but no false notes. Nothing and no one is predictable, and yet we believe in them all: the regular tanker driver, the next door neighbour with her two bouncing children, and Jaap, the old farm labourer from the twins’ childhood who comes back to the farm in time for the last great upheaval, as Helmer finally takes charge of what is left of his own life.

According to Alison Flood in The Guardian, Bakkar got the idea for the book while he was hiking in the mountains of Corsica in 2002.  He said he had the idea of a son :

who was going to do something terrible to his father. ... It stayed in my mind for months and I got so frustrated – nothing was happening with the idea. Then I just sat down and got writing. I didn't know where I was going, I just started – for me that's a good way to write.

Bakkar is a gardener by trade and says that writing and gardening :

... work well together. In the autumn when I rake the dead leaves I can do it for hours – once I even disturbed a pile I'd made so I could go on raking. The sound is so wonderful: it lets you think in a subconscious way, in the back of your mind. 

Bakker also works as a skating instructor in the winter.

If It's Not a Good Read ...

I am often amazed by how sloppy the books by massive names are ... Sometimes we took a deep breath before agreeing that probably this book, had it been written by a debut author, would not have been looked at.

Richard Lea in The Guardian quotes Anne Fine one of the judges for the IMPAC Dublin Literary award : Philp Roth, Salman Rushdie and José Saramago are among those who failed to make the shortlist this year.  and I think that we would wholeheartedly agree with her criterion :

If it's not a good read, then it's not a good book

(But have to agree to differ with the judges about Joseph O'Neill's novel being a "good read".  Please do let me know, anyone out there, if you actually enjoyed it!)

The shortlist which includes works in translation  :

The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker (Translated from the original Dutch by David Colmer)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (Translated from the original French by Alison Anderson)

In Zodiac Light by Robert Edric

Settlement by Christoph Hein

The Believers by Zoë Heller

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

God's Own County by Ross Raisin 

Libraries around the world selected the books for the longlist as usual. The National Library of Malaysia nominated Rainforest Tears. (More here.)  I am sure that Paul Leslie Smith and his publisher Marshall Cavendish will be thrilled at having made the longlist. I'm surprised that there was no publicity about this.

Debut Novel Wins IMPAC

The world's richest literary prize, the IMPAC Dublin has been awarded to debut novelist Michael Thomas for his novel Man Gone Down. The American author beat off some powerful competition on the shortlist including Junot Dias, Indra Sinha and Mohsin Hamid.

The judges said of the book :

We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas’ masterful debut, Man Gone Down, will stay with readers for a long time. He lingers because this extraordinary novel comes to us from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight. Tuned urgently to the way we live now, the winner of the International Dublin IMPAC Prize 2009 is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth. ... The first person narrator in Man Gone Down has not fallen, yet. But he stands at a precipice. A black man from Boston married to a white woman with whom he has three children. A once promising Harvard student now broke and working in construction in Brooklyn. When we meet the narrator, he’s had to leave his wife and children with his disapproving mother-in-law, and now has just four days to raise the money necessary to reunite the family and return the children to school.

Thomas explains in The Guardian how the novel came into being. He'd written what he thought was the beginning of a short story collection for his graduate thesis :

... but one of the stories was crying out to become a novel. ... One day I was doing my laundry and I realised the breaks were chapters, not pages, and I started writing a novel. ... I write to images, or lines, and the end came to me – the last two paragraphs, the last line. I was always writing to it. I had to get there.

Novels with IMPAC

The shortlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has been announced :

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Ravel by Jean Echenoz
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland
The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles by Roy Jacobsen
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha
Man Gone Down by Micheal Thomas

The Award is presented annually with the objective of promoting excellence in world literature. It is open to novels written in any language and by authors of any nationality, provided the work has been published in English or English translation. This year just two of the novels are works in translation - Roy Jacobsen's novel is from the original Norwegian, and Jean Echenoz writes in French.

The overall winner will be announced on June 11th.

Hosseini Libraries' Favourite for IMPAC

The longlist for the 2009 Impac Dublin Literary Award has been announced.

The world's richest literary prize is also its most truly international. Authors from 41 countries have been nominated and many of the novels are works in translation. The titles have also been selected by libraries around the globe. (You can find all 147 titles listed here, and read about each of them.)

Afghan/American writer, Khalid Hosseini is so far the libraries' favourite having received 18 nominations for A Thousand Splendid Suns. Divisadero by Sri Lankan / Canadian Michael Ondaatje was nominated by 13 libraries and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach received 10 nominations.

Other books listed include The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize, The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize and Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen, winner of the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Award.

Rawi Hage Wins IMPAC

And this year's Impac Dublin Literary Award goes to ... Canadian author Rawi Hage for his debut novel De Niro's Game.

In the judges citation, the novel is described as :

... a powerful, stark yet lyrical and compassionate book (in which) luck is a central element. The title refers to the game of chance - to the death-defying game of Russian Roulette played by DeNiro in the film The Deer Hunter. Hage’s characters find themselves in a very different yet equally extreme situation - caught in the civil war raging in Beirut in the 1980’s. Hage’s writing allows the reader a shocking intimacy with the personal impact of such conflicts. Through the fate of his anti-heroes, George and Bassam, he shows how war can envelope lives – how one doesn’t have a choice in such situations. Concepts of guilt and innocence are left to flounder in the hail of bombs and the struggle for survival. Life itself becomes a game with no real winners, only scarred survivors whose estrangement is deeper than any bullet wound, and whose future seems darker than their blacked out city.

Hage was born in Beirut in 1964, and grew up in Lebanon and Cyprus. He studied photography in New York, and in 1991 moved to Montreal. His novel was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2006 Governor General's Award for English fiction and won several smaller prizes. Not bad for an author writing in his third language!

He's also a successful photographer and his work has been acquired by the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Musée de la Civilisation de Québec.

More at The Toronto Star and The Guardian.

International Impact

This year's shortlist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is a truly international one. As Guy Dammann notes in the Guardian, only two of the shortlisted novels originating from the English-speaking world, the rest representing a wide sweep of the globe, and including two works in translation. It is, he says, a particularly topical shortlist with three of the eight novels dealing with the middle east and two of them being concerned directly with the Israeli Arabs.

The shortlisted books are :

The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas (Spanish, in translation)
The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne (Sri Lankan)
De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage (Lebanese)
Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (Australian)
Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua (Israeli)
The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (Algerian) in translation
The Woman who Waited by Andrei Makine (Russian) in translation
Winterwood by Patrick McCabe (Irish)

You can read about all these novels on the award website.

It's interesting who didn't make the shortlist, drawn up by libraries around the world : as Dammann points out, it didn't include any of the literary "heavyweights" (including Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, John Updike, Peter Carey and Cormac McCarthy who had been nominated.)

But it is good to see good books that readers might otherwise have missed (especially as they don't come from the centre of the publishing world) brought to the fore.

Petterson Bags IMPAC

Norwegian author Per Petterson has now won his second major literary award for Out Stealing Horses. (You may remember that he also won the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Award.)

According to the Guardian, the judges called the novel:

... a poignant and moving tale of a changing perspective on the world ... and of nostalgia for a simpler way of life.

while the Irish poet and judge Gerald Dawe called it:

...a wonderfully subtle book. In the background, shadowing it with an almost ghostly narrative, there is the history of how war impacts on families in very different ways.

The IMPAC Dublin Prize is the world's richest award, and books are nominated by libraries across the world.

Postscript:

Local newspaper unclear on the concept. A headline in today's Malay Mail screams:

Norwegian Bags Booker prize

Duh!

Predictable IMPAC

The short list for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has been announced:

Arthur and George - Julian Barnes
A Long Long Way - Sebastian Barry
Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
The Short Day Dying - Peter Hobbs
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
Out Stealing Horses - Per Petterson
Shalimar the Clown - Salman Rushdie

Remember - this is the prize awarded to books nominated by libraries around the world. The National Library of Malaysia nominated Tash Aw's Harmony Silk Factory, but it didn't make it beyond the longlist.

This seems to be a safe and solid list with no real surprises. The titles are familiar - many of these books have already won or been nominated for other literary prizes. All except Per Patterson's book were first published in the UK or the US and were written in English (and his book, you will remember, won the Independent Foreign fiction award last year.) And there is not a single female author on the list this year!

It might have been nice to have had a few surprises, some great novels from out there which would otherwise have slipped beneath out radar.

IMPAC at Length

The longlist for the IMPAC Dublin Prize (the world's most financially rewarding literary prize) has just been announced, and this year 138 novels nominated by 169 libraries from 129 cities in 49 countries. The Guardian reports that:

... on a list dominated by literary big-hitters, including Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee, André Brink, Margaret Atwood and Nadine Gordimer, two acclaimed novels stand out for the sheer number of nominations they have received. Kazuo Ishiguro's take on the cloning debate, Never Let Me Go, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker prize, is the librarians' favourite with 18 nominations. Ian McEwan's Saturday, a tale of one extraordinary day in the life of a London brainsurgeon, garners 12 nominations, from Moscow to Tallahassee. John Banville's stylised Booker-winner, The Sea, is also a popular choice, while Zadie Smith's Orange-winner, On Beauty, which is partly set in Massachussets, receives support from Boston. ... Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is in the running with 12 nominations and support that extends from Brazil to Belfast.

You might remember the controversy last year about some libraries nominating their compatriots rather than voting for the best fiction worldwide, which is surely in the spirit of the thing. The Guardian doesn't see it that way:

...this is part of Impac's charm. Where else would you come across a first novel from a Kathmandu author, Echoes of Pain by Ravi Thapaliya, (nominated by the national library of Nepal)?

You can read the longlist in its entirety and browse information on the nominees here.

Now then, what novel do you think our very patriotic National Library here nominated? Were you right? Were they right?

2004: The Year of Henry James

How would you feel if you wrote a novel about a famous historical character, only to find that another novelist had chosen exactly the same subject and even focused on the very same period of his life?

Poor David Lodge! He did not realise until after he'd finished his Author, Author that Colm Toibin had also written a novel about Henry James, the highly acclaimed, The Master.

Lodge must have felt pretty gutted as he saw more critical praise heaped on his rival's novel than on his, along with nominations for the top awards. (And of course, The Master won the IMPAC Prize.)

Lodge has now written The Year of Henry James, in which he looks back on the experience. But he still hasn't managed to bring himself to pick up Toibin's book, he says.

Was there something in the air or in the water in 2004, that made the world suddenly go mad for Henry James? As this piece in the Telegraph points out:

There were no features in Vanity Fair, no editorial columns, and no heated discussions in pubs. But among writers, everything went a bit James. ... Four Jamesian novels came out within months of each other: biographical works by Colm Tóibín and David Lodge, and more tangential novels from Alan Hollinghurst and Toby Litt (The Line of Beauty and Ghost Story). How should one respond to this synchronicity, other than to accept it as proof that novelists are not only cut off from the wider world, but that they are cut off in the same kind of way?

James has always been a writer's writer and I think the apparent synchronicity reflects a desire for a return to a kind of elegant craftsmanship that seems to have fallen by the wayside in modern fiction writing.

Time to reread the master himself!

Masterful Toibin Wins IMPAC

It was pretty much on the cards that Irish writer Colm Toibin would take the IMPAC Dublin Prize for The Master, which received more library nominations than any other book. And yesterday, he did.

The novel is a portrayal of 19th-century novelist and critic Henry James, which the judges praised for its "crisp, modulated writing". They said:

[The book's] preoccupations are truth and the elusiveness of intimacy, and from such preoccupations emerge this patient, beautiful exposure of loss and the price of the pursuit of perfection.

Related Post:

Award Fatigue (9/4/06)

Who is Vyvyane Loh?

A local writer has been shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Prize - one of the world's major literary awards ... I needed Dreamer Idiot to nudge my elbow and point it out to me. (Who learns from who, hey, on this blog?)

Vyvyane was born in Ipoh, and grew up in Singapore. She's a dancer, a choreographer, studied medicine at Boston University Medical School, travelled to Brazil and Nepal to do medical electives, worked up to four jobs (spinning/aerobics instructor, personal trainer, dance instructor, moonlighting doctor) while pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing ... her life-story is fascinating (makes me feel utterly totally inadequate), go take a look. Not to mention she has a body to die for. I'm not jealous. Not really.

And of course, there's the novel. Her first. Breaking the Tongue, which chronicles the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in World War II. And she's been compared to Rushdie and Ondaatje.

This is for sure someone we should be cheering on and learning from.

Award Fatigue

Ho hum. I'm not a very good litblogger because I suffer from Literary Award fatigue. There are just so many longlists, shortlists, winners, that one can blog about ... but that's a shameful admission because these lists serve as useful reading guides for anyone who wants to be a bit more adventurous in their reading and get out of the sticking-with-familiar-writers-rut.

But if there seem to be more such lists around than there used to be - there probably are. Apparently even the Booker committee hadn't used to announce it's longlist (and now that they do I feel oliged to buy and read the whole bloody lot and severe bookguilt if I miss any out). It's probably true for the other awards as well. And of course, there are more awards these days.

Anyway. The shortlist for the Dublin-based 2006 IMPAC prize was announced a few days ago. It's a very interesting literary prize since it is open to authors of any nationality and written in any language, provided they have been published in English translation, and thus casts its net a lot more widely than other literary awards. The longlist is actually nominated by libraries across the world, and you may remember that I picked up a controversy about the librarians in some countries (inc. Malaysia) nominating a title by a national writer rather than for the best book of the year.

Thankfully librarians from elsewhere seem to have been clearer on the concept and less kiasu: the original longlist of 132 books has now been whittled down to a shortlist of just 10 titles. And the nominations are:

• Graceland by Chris Abani
• Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam
• Havoc, In Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett
• The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe
• An Altered Light by Jens Christian Grondahl - translated from the Danish by Anne Born
• The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra - translated from the French by John Cullen
• Breaking the Tongue by Vyvyane Loh
• Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini - translated from the Italian by John Cullen
• The Master by Colm Tóibín
• The Logogryph by Thomas Wharton

The Master by Colm Toibin was nominated by no less than 17 libraries across the world, so I'd put my money on that horse if I were a betting person.

The winner will be announced on July 14 2006.

While I'm on the subject of shortlists and the best of world literature, let me apologise for not linking to this piece on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist which was announced back in March. This prize is entirely for works in translation - and that's all to the good since we often just don't hear about the best books from the rest of the world.

This award will be presented on the 2nd May.

Enough awards for one day, though I can think of several others I should have blogged about. With any luck you won't even notice which they are ...

Making an IMPAC

Haven't mentioned the IMPAC Dublin Award nominees at all yet, so here they are.

As you can see, it's an extremely long longlist (132 books!!), and many of the titles were nominated for, or have won other awards already. The books are nominated by librarians throughout the world, so there's a pleasing international flavour to the list, and 31 of the books are works in translation.

The Literary Saloon imples that many librarians seem not to be familiar with anything other than their local literature and notes that some libraries are clearly basing their choices on patriotic fervour rather than on literary merit. It suggests an amendment to the rules so that countries are not allowed to nominate their own authors.

Our own Rani Manicka is on the longlist for Touching Earth. Let's see if you can guess which library nominated it. Check your answer here.