Biggest literary prize goes to little-known Norwegian
Michelle Pauli
Thursday June 14, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
A writer little known beyond Norway has beaten many of the biggest international names to the world's richest book prize. Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses takes the 100,000-euro purse for the Impac Dublin award for what the judges called "a poignant and moving tale of a changing perspective on the world ... and of nostalgia for a simpler way of life."The melancholy tale, translated by Anne Born, follows a 67-year-old man who is forced to remember the traumatic events of his childhood. His life was changed forever in the summer of 1948, when he was only 15. Through his memories the novel brings that distant summer to life and explores how the recovered past disturbs the present.
Petterson said that he was happy and surprised to have won the Impac. "It seems with this book I am the boy with the golden trousers and every time I put my hand in my pockets I pick up a golden coin," he said. "It is so cool."
Anne Born's English translation was published in November 2005 to great critical acclaim, and the author and translator won the £10,000 Independent foreign fiction prize with the book last year. However, the book has yet to reach the wider audience enjoyed by the bestselling original in Petterson's home country, where it also won the booksellers' award.
Nonetheless, it beat a shortlist of big-hitters to the Impac, fending off competition from the South African Nobel laureate JM Coetzee with Slow Man, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, Julian Barnes's Arthur and George and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
According to the Lebanese novelist and judge Hanan al-Shaykh, the winning novel "had everything".
The Irish poet and judge Gerald Dawe agreed. It "pipped past the post" of the strong shortlist, he said, because it is "a wonderfully subtle book. In the background, shadowing it with an almost ghostly narrative, there is the history of how war impacts on families in very different ways."
While Petterson has namechecked Norway's 1920 Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun as a particular inspiration for the novel, the subtlety of Out Stealing Horses, with its focus on character and relationships rather than plot owes much to the influence of the American writer Raymond Carver. As well as a number of other novels Petterson has also published a collection of short stories.
The Impac stands out from the crowd of literary prizes not just for its purse, its notoriously massive longlist (this year's was 138-srong) and its international scope (nominations for the longlist came from 169 libraries from 129 cities in 49 countries), but also for its long lead-time. Books first published in English between January and December 2005, or first published in a language other than English between January 2001 and December 2005, are eligible for consideration. This means titles that have already done the rounds of literary prizes have a final chance, and books that may have drifted from public consciousness are granted a second wave of publicity.
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