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
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Tuesday New Release Day: Coetzee; Li; Enriquez; Hoffman; Hogan; Puchner; Shepard
Out this week: The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee; Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li; Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez; Running by Cara Hoffman; The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan; Last Day On Earth by Eric Puchner; and The World to Come by Jim Shepard. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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A brand new lit mag out of Canada, Numero Cinq, goes by the tagline “a warm place on a cruel web.” As if to drive home the point, the editors published a nifty study of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
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Testimonies
At the LARB, Millions contributor Nathan Deuel reviews Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball, which we covered as part of our Great 2014 Book Preview. Nathan calls the novel “daring and odd” and notes that, as the plot advances, “even we readers become slightly shaky witnesses.” You can learn more about Jesse Ball’s work in our own Janet Potter’s review of his novel The Curfew.
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Against Captain Underpants
Renaissance Learning has released its annual report on what children are reading. The NYDaily News books blog takes offense at some of the more popular books named in the report, suggesting that kids and teens deserve to be challenged by better literature. The Huffington Post mines through the report to discover that American teenagers on average are still reading at or near the level of fifth graders.
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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.)