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
See Spot Run
Is there any animal more noble than your beloved childhood pet? In this moving essay from 3:AM Magazine, Adrian Nathan West explains a couple of lessons that he learned about love and devotion from his Labrador named Jake.
A Swan of Old
"After only a few lines of Mallarmé, you are engulfed in fine mist, and terror sets in." Here's a piece from The New Yorker on contending with the supreme enigma of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry.
The other work of a creative
"What you might call an invisible economy of house sitters exists across the country," writes Aaron Gilbreath in the Paris Review. His account of the generosity and clean counter-spaces of friends is a humbling reminder of the flip side of creative work.
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Sense of an Ending
How do you know when you’re finished writing a novel? Electric Literature’s advice column, The Blunt Instrument, tackles the timeless questions of how to begin and when to end. If it’s endings you’re after, this piece from The Millions on writers and last lines will help give you some closure.
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“My awareness and relationship with covers began nearly a decade ago.”
Craig Mod’s superb take on book cover design in the digital age, “Hack the Cover,” is really worth the read.
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.)