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     Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 7996 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
>>INFO: african-american novel wins Irish literature prize =========================================== http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/11/debut-novelist-impac-dublin-prize Debut novelist takes €100,000 Impac Dublin prize Michael Thomas's Man Gone Down beats Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates to prestigious award Alison Flood - guardian.co.uk A debut novelist who says he's never really had a proper job has won the world's richest literary award. American writer Michael Thomas beat authors including Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates to take the €100,000 (£85,000) Impac Dublin prize with his debut novel, Man Gone Down. "I'm stunned," Thomas said today, in Dublin for the prize ceremony from his home town of New York. "I had a hard time believing I'd made the shortlist – or the longlist, for that matter – so I'm still waiting for the punch line." Currently a professor at Hunter College in New York, he said he'd use his winnings to "pay some bills". "It's too late to bet on myself [winning]," he said. "I've had an interesting life up until now, so I may get a little more conservative. I've got three kids, a mortgage, a half-built house ..." Man Gone Down is a stream-of-consciousness narrative by a black man from Boston, married to a white woman with whom he has three children. The story stretches over a four-day period, with the unnamed narrator on the eve of his 35th birthday, broke and estranged from his family, with just four days to find the money to keep his family afloat. Described by the judging panel as an "extraordinary novel ... from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight", Thomas said he'd written it at a time when he was "feeling a little desperate" himself. It beat seven other shortlisted novels – including Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Junot Díaz's Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Indra Sinha's Booker-shortlisted Animal's People - and an international longlist of 147 titles, nominated by libraries around the world, to take the prize. "We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas's masterful debut, Man Gone Down, will stay with readers for a long time," said the panel of judges, which included the novelists Rachel Billington and Timothy Taylor. "Tuned urgently to the way we live now, [Man Gone Down] is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth." Boston-born Thomas's path to the prize has been a tortuous one, via years of working in restaurants, bars, on film sets, as a construction worker, a pizza delivery man and a taxi driver. "I've never really had a job," he said. "Not a nine-to-five thing." He wrote poetry well into his twenties, also performing as a singer-songwriter, and then decided to study a fiction programme at graduate school. His graduate thesis was the beginnings of a short story collection – he'd always wanted to write short fiction – but one of the stories was crying out to become a novel. "One day I was doing my laundry and I realised the breaks were chapters, not pages, and I started writing a novel," Thomas said. "I write to images, or lines, and the end came to me – the last two paragraphs, the last line. I was always writing to it. I had to get there." He eventually picked up a publisher – Grove Atlantic – for the book after "a number of rejections ... I didn't think it was going to happen". He's now working on his second book, which will be non-fiction, but said he had no plans to stop teaching despite the €100,000 cheque he received tonight in Dublin. Thomas becomes the third debut author to win the Impac award since its inception in 1996, after Andrew Miller won in 1999 with Ingenious Pain and Rawi Hage took last year's prize for De Niro's Game. Previous winners of the prize – which is open to novels written in any language, provided the work has been published in English – include Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson and The Master by Colm Tóibín. | ||
| Carey AALBC .com Platinum Poster Username: Carey Post Number: 1938 Registered: 05-2004 Rating: N/A |
That's great, there's still hope for the little guy. Heck, I might have a story or two. | ||
| Ferociouskitty Veteran Poster Username: Ferociouskitty Post Number: 756 Registered: 02-2008 Rating: N/A |
I started reading this. Honestly, I stumbled across it (can't remember where) and bought it out of curiosity because he's black and has the same name as my ex-husband. I didn't finish it because life got in the way; it's still in my too-read pile. I liked what I did read. | ||
| Cynique "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Cynique Post Number: 13793 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A |
This seems to be an inspiring example of how cream eventually rises to the top. And I'm especially impressed with how the author was apparently made worldly by his broad range of experiences. | ||
| Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 7998 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
This seems to be an inspiring example of how cream eventually rises to the top. (Scum does too, by the way) | ||
| Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 8003 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
A portion of this is in Best African American Fiction 2009 http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Best-African-American-Fiction-2009/Gerald-Early /e/9780553806892#TOC |
