Debut Novelist Wins Dublin's Impac Prize
Posted on June 11, 2009
A first time novelist has beaten out such literary luminaries as Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Doris Lessing to win Dublin's Impac Prize, which carries a cash prize of 100,000 Euros. American Michael Thomas won the world's most lucrative book prize for his 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 ..."Thomas was born in Boston and spent years working as a taxi driver, waiter, construction worker and a pizza delivery man. He wrote poetry and wrote songs, but it wasn't until he entered graduate school that he concentrated on his fiction writing. For his graduate thesis, he wrote a series of short stories that he eventually turned into a novel which was published by Grove Atlantic, after many rejections. He is currently working on a nonfiction book, but you can be sure that his agent is urging him to get to work on his next novel.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.
*****
"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."