Jon McGregor has won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, otherwise known as the richest literary prize in all the land*, for his novel Even the Dogs. To check out the rest of the pool, you can revisit our coverage of both the long and shortlist for the prize. (McGregor’s tweet about this whole affair was pretty grand, by the way.) [*Ed note: a reader in the comments below has disputed this claim.]
McGregor Takes the IMPAC
Hospital Hijinks
Recommended Reading: The first chapter from Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book, “OH MY GOD.”
More Anticipated Books
The eagle-eyed Scott Esposito spots fall publication dates for volumes I and II of Murakami‘s IQ84…and for Helen DeWitt‘s new novel (!), Lightning Rods, due out from New Directions.
Libraries: Future and Present
“Flooded with data as we are, each day brings even more innovations and technologies to help us mine, sort, and generate even more information. Asking about the future of libraries is another way of asking where this big, hot mess of information is taking us.” Justin Wadland reviews three books on libraries and attempts to predict the future of these institutions in a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University has just opened and its library has no books at all.
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What is Poetry?
“Poetry is clumps of words that make people feel something,” says Wendy MacLeod, in answer to one of Poetry’s most frequently asked questions on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
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I don’t know why everyone says it is, but the IMPAC isn’t the world’s highest-paid lit prize. Have you heard of the Nobel? (see also, many more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_richest_literary_prizes) . Really, McGregor should feel pretty hard done by…
Thanks for pointing that out, Tom. I’ve updated the post. I’ll admit that I’d always repeated the claim, despite knowing about the Nobel’s higher award, because I figured there was some manner of technicality involved. Going through the list on Wikipedia, my first suspicion was that the Impac was the only one open to a global field of authors, or that perhaps the more lucrative prizes were enacted (or had money added to them) after the Impac had already been set up. I don’t really believe that’s the case, so now I’m wondering why the claim’s been circulating, too.
The Impac website claims that the prize is the largest “of its kind.” As someone who doesn’t know much about the other prizes on that Wikipedia list (other than the Nobel, which doesn’t apply to what I’m about to say), perhaps that means it’s the most lucrative international prize set up with the longlist/shortlist format. (The Nobel’s a wild guess for everybody until it’s awarded each year.)