14 Jun 2012 19:28:00
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 (£80,000) International Impac Dublin Literary Award on Wednesday evening. Nominations for the prize are received from libraries around the world – Even the Dogs was proposed by a Moscow library – 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.
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.
"It fills the reader with a vivid sense of how the novel accommodates new techniques and idioms; in doing so it becomes thrilling in a way that is mysterious, frightening in a way that grapples us closer to the characters' circumstances, and finally, noble in its clear-eyed truth telling. With no hectoring or table thumping, the author gets us to stand and listen. When we close the book we marvel that McGregor, in less than two hundred pages, has managed to sketch such a complete and complex picture of a world which is so near to hand but so seldom lingered over."
McGregor, whose debut novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was longlisted for the Booker prize in 2002 when he was just 26, said he had been startled by the response to Even the Dogs. "Since it came out in 2010 I've been really surprised by people's reactions to it. When I started writing it, it seemed it would be a difficult book to read – it was a difficult book to write. But I wanted to write the book I wanted to write without making concessions to how easy it was going to be to read – to people's squeamishness," he said.
"The context of using crack and heroin and living on the street is fairly unpleasant. There is some stuff in there that's fairly harsh. And the language I've written it in is intended to evoke a fairly chaotic state of mind and circumstances," he said.
"There's lots about it I expected plenty of people not to respond to – I was prepared for the worst, but actually what has happened is that, maybe because I did go all out, actually people have taken the leap with me. I like to read books which give me a challenge, I expect to do some work, and hopefully that's what readers, and these judges, have responded to."
McGregor said it was "a real honour to have been selected from such a huge list of fantastic works from around the world" to win the Impac, which has been won in the past by Rawi Hage, Per Petterson and Colm Tóibín.
