Michael Thomas Wins IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Debut novelist takes home the world's richest literary prize

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 6/11/2009 2:25:00 PM

Michael Thomas has won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel, Man Gone Down, which Black Cat, a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, published in 2007. The IMPAC Dublin is the world’s richest literary prize, worth €100,000 (almost US $150,000). A Grove spokesperson said the publisher has 50,000 copies of the title in print and is going back to press for another 10,000.

The award is presented annually to promote excellence in world literature and is open to novels written in any language and by authors of any nationality, provided the work has been published in English or English translation. Nominations are submitted by library systems in major cities throughout the world. Man Gone Down was chosen from a shortlist of eight novels, including works from the U.S., France, India, Pakistan and Norway.

PW’s review praised Man Gone Down’s narrator’s “note of hard-won optimism,” and Thomas’s ability to steer him “clear of sentimentality.”