Thursday, June 14, 2012

Impac makes an impact?

Much fuss in the UK newspapers today about the Impac Prize -- sorry, it seems to be the International Impac Dublin Literary Award -- which has been won by Jon McGregor. Apparently he has 'beaten the Pulitzer prize-winning American writer Jennifer Egan to win the world's richest literary award for his novel Even the Dogs.'

As you can see, it's a lit'ry thing, this prize, so it is no surprise, perhaps, that I'd never heard of it before today (or had forgotten it). Neither had I heard of young McGregor.

Having read some of the stories about the winner and his novel I can't say that I'm rushing out to buy it, or even reserve it at the library, but that's because I'm a well known philistine, with no interest in kulcha.

However, good luck to the lad. Prizewinner or not, he has chosen a tough life (that of a literary author). I don't envy him that life style at all. Would you swap the life of Martin Amis, say, for your own? Not me, anyway. Sounds bloody miserable.

Dean Wesley Smith, on the other hand....


2 comments:

Maxine Clarke said...

I hadn't heard of the award or the author, either, but assumed I was particularly ignorant.

On the post at the link - many good points but from the point of view of the reader, the self-publishing/e-revolution that has happened while you were away is a nightmare ....basically you just have to ignore it all, even though there are probably some good books among the zillions that are crap, rubbish and worse (and excruciatingly badly proof-read and non-edited, despite the post by your friend.)

I have asked Amazon if they will provide fields for self- vs traditional published books, but they won't - their search etc is geared up to making you buy kindle, rather than print, books, which are proportionately more likely to be self-published. One thing about traditional publishing is that there is filtering, imperfect, true, but it is there (and one can ignore the genres one does not like much more easily as the total output is smaller).

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