IMPAC Dublin winner

Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker has won the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his first adult novel, The Twin. Bakker is also the author of a children's dictionary and the teen novel, Pear Trees Bloom White.

Read more from...:
IMPAC website
National Post
Quillblog
The Dewey Divas and The Dudes

OPL + IMPAC

This month's City Librarian's Monthly Report has a snippet about our IMPAC submissions. You might not know that...

"Every year for as long as the award has been given ([since] 1996), the Ottawa Public Library has participated by submitting 3 novels published in the previous year. One year we nominated Alistair MacLeod's Some Great Mischief, which won the IMPAC for 2001! Our reading committee includes David Staines of the University of Ottawa, Randall Ware, formerly of Library and Archives Canada, Linda Sherlow-Lowdon formerly of the OPL, and chief librarian of Kanata Public Library, as well as library staff from Collection Management and branches. We read, judge and nominate what we think will be of international calibre to compete for such a prestigious literary prize. OPL sent in our nominees for this year:

Galore by Michael Crummey...."vividly imagines life in Newfoundland’s early permanent fishing settlements established around the beginning of the 19th century. It is a poetic and powerful rendering of an intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to distinguish"

The Bishop's Man by Linden MacIntyre ......"is perhaps as close as we will get to eavesdropping on the private conversations we were never meant to hear among clergy or between clergy and "complainers". It is an unforgettable and complex character study of a deeply conflicted man at the precipice of his life. It poses the question can any act of contrition redeem our own complicity?"

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin...... "is a love story which penetrates to the chilly core of the Cambodian tragedy of the 1970's in a love story between a young Montrealer and a Cambodian foreign student to the rampages of the Khmer Rouge and evokes questions about our very human need to revisit the past.""

I hereby confess...

...that I have only read one of the shortlisted IMPAC Dublin Literary Award books:
The Believers by Zoë Heller (which I really liked)

Which is one less than Obama (a fact that becomes quite sad when you realise how much less time he probably has for novel-reading!)

The other contenders are:
The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
In Zodiac Light by Robert Edric
Settlement by Christoph Hein
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin (title in Canada and the U.S.: Out Backward)
Home by Marilynne Robinson

The winner will be announced on June 17th.

I can't pick any of these up right now; I'm reading my way through the Orange list (completed The way things look to me by Roopa Farooki last week - brilliant; on to Savage Lands by Clare Clark this week - which so far reads like a Dear Canada children's novel, but I am only at the very beginning and I have high hopes).

National Library Service in Barbados

I just think it's great that the National Library Service in Barbados nominated Michael Thomas's Man Gone Down for the IMPAC. Man, that prize is all about democracy, and it amazes me every time. Seen via.

IMPAC Dublin surprise! + quick update from Ottawa

Man Gone Down, by first-time American novelist, Michael Thomas, has catapulted ahead of Philip Roth, Doris Lessing, Junot Diaz, Joyce Carol Oates and others to win the IMPAC Dublin prize. Yes, that's €100,000 (£85,000). The Guardian reports he is "currently a professor at Hunter College in New York," and that "he said he'd use his winnings to pay some bills."

I love it when the underdog wins!

Meanwhile, in Alex-land, today was my first day back at my branch after a 2-week hiatus (CLA, vacay, meeting in Toronto, training). It's been wild, which I expected, but also a pleasure to be back, which I didn't expect. Unfortunately, I have a splitting headache, which is probably due to the wild part.

Yesterday, I amused myself at a press conference for the annoucement of the site of the new Central Library for Ottawa. My own report from the morning is here; other (real) news reports are here (Citizen), here (Metro news), here (CBC) and ici (Le Droit).

I wasn't too impressed with the CBC article, which quotes a patron outside Main Library as saying "he'd be sad to see the old building go." I think it's not by any means "fine as it is." Of course, some people will always say they don't see the importance of a new library branch, Central or otherwise, but this is a long-time library user. Argh.

I think part of this sentiment involves the mentality that, despite being a national capital, Ottawa is seen by Ottawans as a very "fine as it is" city. Our urban design doesn't strive for greatness, or even uniqueness. We seem to throw buildings up willy-nilly, letting development companies get away with whatever (ahem), and only ever asking for adequate spaces.

Let's take a chance or two with the new Central Library, and help set the tone for Ottawa as an awe-inspiring national capital!