The short list for the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is out. What exactly is the IMPAC you ask? It is an award sponsored by IMPAC, a productivity improvement company, and the city of Dublin. The award is in its seventh year and delivers a hefty sum of 100,000 euros ($139,000 Cdn) to the winner. That makes it the world's highest prize for a single piece of fiction in English. The winner will be announced in lovely May, on the 13th of the month.
Libraries from around the world nominate books for the award. The nominations are based on high literary merit. Warning: this is not a popularity contest. A look at the judges confirms this, they are all heavyweights in the world of literature. Just to mention a few, the nominees will have to hold the gaze of: Michael Holroyd the world's pre-meninent biographer (Lytton Strachey, Bernard Shaw, and Augustus John), writer Audrey Thomas (who has worked in Canada since 1959), and Icelandic novelist Steinunn Sigurdardotir.
Margaret Atwood'sThe Blind Assassin has once again made the list. This leading literary lady already took away the 2000 Booker for this masterpiece. It appears Canada is well regarded by libraries around the world as eight Canadian writers made the previously announced long list. Alas, Atwood is the only Canadian to make the short list.
The other books on the short list are: True History of the Kelly Gang by Australian Peter Carey, the two-time Booker winner; The Keepers of the Truth by Michael Collins, born in Ireland; The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt; The Years with Laura Diaz by Carlos Fuentes, Atomised by Michel Houellebecq, a resident of Ireland, and Madame by Antoni Libera of Poland.
Surprisingly The Human Stain, by Philip Roth did not make the short list. This book was nominated to the long list from libraries around the world such as Hungary, USA, Belgium and South Africa.
Breaking News: W.G. Sebald, received the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize on Monday March 11th. The German-born novelist was killed in a road car crash last December. His book Austerlitz has been called a 'dreamlike meditation on memory' "He was happy before he died and he would have been pleased to win this award," said his agent, Andrew as quoted in a recent article in the Globe and Mail
The NBCC prize for criticism went to the novelist Martin Amis for The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000.
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