— June – July
culture
A
slum with spectral addicts in bleak-
est England. Lost chances and lost
lives in the damp Dutch countryside.
Murdered miniaturists in the Ottoman
Empire. Cape Breton Island, Canada, and the
perils of the ice. As it announces its eighteenth
annual award, the International IMPAC Dublin
Literary Award is a portal to a wide world of
literature.
Open to novelists writing in any language, pro-
vided they have been translated into English, the
IMPAC was established in after the then
energetic mayor, Gay Mitchell, commissioned
an expert group to consider the feasibility of
a Dublin-based literary award. Sponsorship
comes from a company with the prosaic goal of
improving company productivity with a name
that conjures the awful management clichés and
illiteracies that centre on the tiring use of ‘impact’
as a verb, but which in fact deserves credit for a
beguiling effervescent integrity.
The judging panel this year includes an
Estonian, a Pakistani, an Algerian and Patrick
McCabe all chaired by a US retired federal judge.
With a momentous monetary value of €,
for the winner – or a / split between author
and translator for a novel written in a language
other than English – the IMPAC can radically alter
a writer’s circumstances. It also attracts for its
nominated authors an international platform of
readers. Each year the longlist is generated by
invited public libraries across the world, from
Jamaica to Australia, Kenya to Mexico. Typically
in the region of to books, the gargan-
tuan list is then whittled down to a maximum of
ten titles by a panel of transnational judges with
literary airs. This shortlist is announced in April
each year, with the eventual winner proclaimed
by the Lord Mayor of Dublin at the unavoidable
gala dinner in the Mansion House in June.
As this issue of Village goes to press, the
awards ceremony is underway. Among the favour-
ites are Kevin Barry’s ‘City of Bohane’, the only
Irish novel to make this year’s shortlist, previous
winners Michel Houellebecq and Andrew Miller
for their novels ‘The Map and the Territory’ and
‘Pure’ respectively, and the multimillion selling
‘Q’ by Japanese author Haruki Murakami.
There are ten books in total on this year’s
shortlist, five of which are in translation, the high-
est number in the history of the award. That so
many international works make it on to the list
is not surprising for an award that is known for
the diversity and equitableness of its selection.
The longlist comprised titles nomi-
nated by libraries in cities from countries
across the world. Equally unsurprising then is the
conversational frequency of the word ‘cross-eyed’
from members of the judging committees.
“It’s a lot of reading”, says author Colum
McCann, who judged the award in when
Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod’s ‘No Great
Mischief’ prevailed. “I think I read well over a
hundred books, but you get to discover new voices
and jump around from continent to continent. It’s
also great that it doesn’t go on reputation or your
previous publishing history. It goes for a particu-
lar piece of work. It’s selective in that respect and
it was a fun thing to judge”.
McCann of course knows all about awards
sarah gilmartin
Dublin’s cosmopolitan
literary award has
an effervescent, lofty,
democratic and
acrobatic integrity – by
comparison to some
other well-known prizes
Impacful
Margaret Hayes, Dublin City
Librarian and the Lord Mayor, Cllr.
Naoise Ó Muir, photo Jason Clarke
– his novel ‘Let The Great World Spin’ won the
IMPAC in . How did it change things for
him as a writer? “To get an award like that in your
home town, an award that comes from libraries,
the heart of the reading population, was fantastic”,
he says. “It was a moment of pure pride for me. Of
course it’s also a very generous literary prize and
that changes things and shifts things for you. It
justifies the work and it shows you that there are
readers out there that believe in literature”.
Fostering this love of literature ubiquitously
is one of the primary motivations of the IMPAC
award, according to Deputy Dublin City Librarian
Brendan Teeling: “We set out to create an award
that would celebrate Dublin’s literary herit-
age and reward excellence in world literature. I
think we’ve managed to do that and the quality
of the winners is there for everyone to see. We’ve
brought literature to people’s attention that they
otherwise maybe wouldn’t have come across”.
The range is the core of the IMPAC’s reputa-
tion. “There is nothing local about the IMPAC”,
says Irish author James Ryan who judged the
award in , when Michael Thomas won for
‘Man Gone Down’. “It brings voices to us that we
wouldn’t have known. The year I was judging there
were two or three contemporary French authors
who I had never heard of, whose work I conse-
quently came to value very highly”, And how did
he handle the workload of reading approximately
novels in the space of a few months? “It’s a
great pleasure when you see those four big boxes
arriving in your office on a truck cart, not least
because you look like such a dogged and unre-
lenting reader”, Ryan says. “But seriously, coming
into contact with that kind of fiction is an educa-
tion and a privilege”.
In literary circles the IMPACis seen as lofty-
ish. Whereas the Man Booker Prize has in the past
been criticised for its selection process – novelist
and former Booker judge, AL Kennedy, disdained
the award as “a pile of crooked nonsense” in
– but the IMPAC is applauded for its more demo-
cratic ontogenesis.
“It’s a leveller”, says arts journalist and broad-
caster Sinéad Gleeson. “With other awards there
are criteria and structures for getting books into
the realm of nomination, but with IMPAC you
don’t feel the weight of publishers and publicists
pushing their books towards the libraries or judg-
ing panel. It’s libraries listening to what people
are talking about and acknowledging the books
they’re borrowing. The jockeying that goes on
in other awards is absent and that’s what makes
Impac so refreshing”.
Poet and former judge Gerald Dawe agrees
and also rides the ugly horseracing metaphor,
highlighting that the lack of commercial pressure
ensures fair judgement based on literary value:
“There’s no agenda. The Booker and these other
awards are very valuable, but they seem to have
become almost like horseraces. IMPAC lives in a
stress-free zone outside of the commercial mar-
keting hothouse. It’s not caught up in the literary
business. It also has great outreach schemes that
engage readers. Groups across the globe will fol-
low through on the longlist and nominate various
titles”.
But is the IMPAC as well known as the Booker
or the Costa? According to Sinéad Gleeson, a mon-
etary prize of this magnitude deserves more
recognition: “It should be as big as the Booker or
the Costa. It’s a life-changing prize for an author
but people don’t talk about the IMPAC as much,
there isn’t the same hype as there is with some of
the others. It’s a shame”.
Dublin City Library says that the media cover-
age for IMPAC has increased over the years. “We
get a lot of support from the Irish media, but it’s
also picked up internationally”, says Teeling. “The
Booker is on the go an awful lot longer and the
English language publishing world in Europe is
It’s a great pleasure when
you see those four big
boxes arriving in your ofce
on a truck cart
“
— June – July
The IMPAC 2013 shortlist
centred on London so a lot of media coverage for
the Booker or the Costa and those types of awards
is generated in the UK. It’s a much bigger market
and they are bound to get much more publicity
there as a result”.
McCann says that the award has a significant
profile in the US. “The IMPAC has an impact over
there. You’ll always see an article in the New York
Times the morning after the awards. It does have
a currency over there that maybe it doesn’t quite
so much have in Britain. But it has huge influence
in Ireland and in the States it’s the same. It’s an
important and recognised award”.
As a lecturer in Trinity College, Gerald Dawe
prizes the fact that the award gets people making
judgements about the fundamentals of good lit-
erature: “How a character is created, how a world
is rendered, how a story is dramatised – it brings
a book back to the structure of using language”.
Dawe was on the panel in , the year that
saw Norwegian writer Per Petterson’s book ‘Out
Stealing Horses’ win from a shortlist that included
Salman Rushdie, J M Coetzee, Sebastian Barry
and Cormac McCarthy. Did the judges have dif-
ficulty agreeing? “There were frank and robust
exchanges,” he teases. “But the consensus was
reached easily enough for Petterson’s wonderful
book. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a judge”.
Happy though cross-eyed.
Translations such as ‘Out Stealing Horses’ get
their chance to shine in the IMPAC. Since
when the award was first established, seven of
the winners have been translated works. “I
love the fact that there’s work in translation and
that the translators themselves get involved”, says
McCann. “There’s far too little attention given
to translators so it’s great to see those works on
there. The award is internationally acrobatic in
that sense, it’s transnational”.
His new novel ‘TransAtlantic’ is out this week,
but McCann feels no trepidation: “I feel like I’ve
been lucky so far and I’m happy for the luck to go
elsewhere”, he says. “It doesn’t put any extra pres-
sure on. In fact, what the IMPAC really does is give
you new readers to expand your lungs”.
culture
2013 IMPAC Shortlist
Pure by Andrew Miller (British)
The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq (French)
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry (Irish)
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (Japanese)
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka (Japanese American)
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (American)
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (American)
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon (Icelandic)
The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am by Kjersti Skomsvold (Norwegian)
Caesarion by Tommy Wieringa (Dutch)
