Colm Tóibín Wins IMPAC Award

Author Colm Tóibín became the first Irish author to win the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award this year, for his novel The Master. As the richest prize in literature, the ?100,000 (approximately $125,800) award honors a single work of fiction published in English.

"It's great just because there are people in the past who have won this prize whose books have really mattered to me," Tóibín said, according to BBC News. He mentioned Alastair MacLeod, who won in 2001 with No Great Mischief, and Edward Jones, who won last year with The Known World. "If you just look at who has won it before, you think, 'God, I would really like my book to be on that list."

Chosen from a short list of 10 novels, The Master is Tóibín's portrayal of writer Henry James and "captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlors and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly alive and vibrant in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitable failed him and those he tried to love," the judges said in a statement. Judges for the 11th IMPAC Award included author Andrew O'Hagan, poet and novelist Mary O'Donnell and non-voting chair Eugene R. Sullivan, a former Chief Judge of a U.S. Court of Appeals.