British author Jon McGregor has beaten the Pulitzer prize-winning American writer Jennifer Egan to win the world's richest literary award for his novel Even the Dogs.
McGregor's third novel, the fractured story of an alcoholic who dies between Christmas and New Year, and the drug addicts and derelicts who knew him, was named winner of the 100,000 Euro International Impac Dublin Literary Award on Wednesday evening. Nominations for the prize are received from libraries around the world, with 147 books put forward this year, from Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad to Aminatta Forna's Commonwealth prize-winning novel The Memory of Love and Manitoba author The Matter with Morris.
The international judging panel called Even the Dogs "a fearless experiment" and a "masterpiece of narrative technique". "There is something bracingly generous about Even the Dogs. It credits readers with a willingness to engage with an experiment which requires us to roll up our sleeves and take authorship of the book as we piece together the lives of its characters," said the panel, which included the British novelist Tim Parks and the Trinidadian writer Elizabeth Nunez.
| Categories: Awards, New Releases, Literature |
Winner of the 2012 Impac Dublin Prize for Fiction. On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New Year, a man's body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on, but th...
