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<span style="font-style: italic">winner of the international impac dublin literary award, his single nomination came from the national library service of barbados. what a ting.</span>
Even before the unexpected announcement came this month, Michael Thomas had enjoyed a run of good luck with “Man Gone Down,” his first novel. Published in 2007 in paperback by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, it got strong reviews, was named to several “10 Best Books” lists that year, including that of The New York Times Book Review, and is now in its fourth printing, with 65,000 copies shipped.
But short of being selected for Oprah’s book club, winning the International Impac Dublin Literary Award may be the best thing that could happen to a new voice like Mr. Thomas. The prize is worth 100,000 euros, or about $138,000, and coincides with publication of “Man Gone Down” in Britain. The announcement immediately generated inquiries from foreign publishing houses.
“I kind of wrote that in a fit,” Mr. Thomas, 41, who teaches literature and creative writing at Hunter College, said of the novel. “I had a bunch of jobs. I was teaching four classes a semester and two or three in the summer, and working construction and coaching soccer and baseball and trying to build my house. I don’t think it is something I could replicate.”
“Man Gone Down” focuses on four increasingly desperate days in the life of an unnamed black narrator living in Brooklyn, whose marriage seems to be falling apart. Brilliant and troubled, he is on the eve of his 35th birthday but is broke, struggling not to lapse back into alcoholism and burdened by the knowledge he has fallen short of the promise he seemed to show as a younger man.
Mr. Thomas acknowledges certain surface similarities to the character he has created. He too grew up in Boston, dropped out of college and scuffled, is a black man married to a white woman (with three children, two boys and a girl, whose first initials correspond to those of the narrator’s children) and has a best friend who is white.
“I was a weird kid, a black kid living in public housing in the wealthiest city east of the Mississippi, who looked at least on the surface to be normal or even cool, even though my head was somewhere else most of the time,” he said. “But I don’t think either of us is pessimistic about race,” he added, speaking of himself and his fictional character.
In its award citation, the five-member Impac Dublin jury called Mr. Thomas “a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight.” It described “Man Gone Down” as a “drama of individual survival set against the myth of an integrated and racially normalized America” and said it “shows, in unsentimental clarity, the way the future can close mercilessly on those marginalized by race and social circumstance.”
<span style="font-weight: bold">The Impac Dublin award is often described as “the largest and most international” literary prize in the world after the Nobel</span>. It is open to fiction written in any language, with nominations made by libraries; in the 2009 competition, 157 libraries in 41 different countries offered 146 candidates. The prize, first awarded in 1996, was established by the Dublin city government and is financed by Impac, the multinational business consulting company.
British bookies have a history of taking bets on literary competitions, and they clearly saw “Man Gone Down” as a long-shot in this particular horse race, placing it seventh among eight finalists. The odds-on favorite was Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” followed closely by “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” written by Mohsin Hamid, who was born in Pakistan, studied in the United States and now lives in London.
In fact, the single nomination for “Man Gone Down” came not from an American library but from the National Library Service of Barbados. The two most frequent nominations from American libraries were Mr. Diaz’s novel and Michael Chabon’s “Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”
“When a Pulitzer is on the list, the odds get stacked immediately,” said James Ryan, an Irish novelist and professor of creative writing who was on the prize jury. “But what arrested my attention with Michael Thomas was his pacing, that he was right in there with his story and his voice from the word go. He’s cutting-edge fiction, right up there.”
Despite the accolades, Mr. Thomas seems somewhat wary, even uneasy, about embracing his good fortune. He wondered whether his triumph should be attributed solely to the merits of his novel or whether other, nonliterary motives may also have been in play.
“My role now is some noble savage,” he said, “some person who has risen to grace from some sort of strange beginnings.” Or as he put it at another point in an interview Friday afternoon at a coffee shop in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, near his home, “If you don’t have a physical deformity and are of above average intelligence and are black or from any marginalized minority, you become a poster boy for uplift.”
Even before the unexpected announcement came this month, Michael Thomas had enjoyed a run of good luck with “Man Gone Down,” his first novel. Published in 2007 in paperback by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, it got strong reviews, was named to several “10 Best Books” lists that year, including that of The New York Times Book Review, and is now in its fourth printing, with 65,000 copies shipped.
But short of being selected for Oprah’s book club, winning the International Impac Dublin Literary Award may be the best thing that could happen to a new voice like Mr. Thomas. The prize is worth 100,000 euros, or about $138,000, and coincides with publication of “Man Gone Down” in Britain. The announcement immediately generated inquiries from foreign publishing houses.
“I kind of wrote that in a fit,” Mr. Thomas, 41, who teaches literature and creative writing at Hunter College, said of the novel. “I had a bunch of jobs. I was teaching four classes a semester and two or three in the summer, and working construction and coaching soccer and baseball and trying to build my house. I don’t think it is something I could replicate.”
“Man Gone Down” focuses on four increasingly desperate days in the life of an unnamed black narrator living in Brooklyn, whose marriage seems to be falling apart. Brilliant and troubled, he is on the eve of his 35th birthday but is broke, struggling not to lapse back into alcoholism and burdened by the knowledge he has fallen short of the promise he seemed to show as a younger man.
Mr. Thomas acknowledges certain surface similarities to the character he has created. He too grew up in Boston, dropped out of college and scuffled, is a black man married to a white woman (with three children, two boys and a girl, whose first initials correspond to those of the narrator’s children) and has a best friend who is white.
“I was a weird kid, a black kid living in public housing in the wealthiest city east of the Mississippi, who looked at least on the surface to be normal or even cool, even though my head was somewhere else most of the time,” he said. “But I don’t think either of us is pessimistic about race,” he added, speaking of himself and his fictional character.
In its award citation, the five-member Impac Dublin jury called Mr. Thomas “a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight.” It described “Man Gone Down” as a “drama of individual survival set against the myth of an integrated and racially normalized America” and said it “shows, in unsentimental clarity, the way the future can close mercilessly on those marginalized by race and social circumstance.”
<span style="font-weight: bold">The Impac Dublin award is often described as “the largest and most international” literary prize in the world after the Nobel</span>. It is open to fiction written in any language, with nominations made by libraries; in the 2009 competition, 157 libraries in 41 different countries offered 146 candidates. The prize, first awarded in 1996, was established by the Dublin city government and is financed by Impac, the multinational business consulting company.
British bookies have a history of taking bets on literary competitions, and they clearly saw “Man Gone Down” as a long-shot in this particular horse race, placing it seventh among eight finalists. The odds-on favorite was Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” followed closely by “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” written by Mohsin Hamid, who was born in Pakistan, studied in the United States and now lives in London.
In fact, the single nomination for “Man Gone Down” came not from an American library but from the National Library Service of Barbados. The two most frequent nominations from American libraries were Mr. Diaz’s novel and Michael Chabon’s “Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”
“When a Pulitzer is on the list, the odds get stacked immediately,” said James Ryan, an Irish novelist and professor of creative writing who was on the prize jury. “But what arrested my attention with Michael Thomas was his pacing, that he was right in there with his story and his voice from the word go. He’s cutting-edge fiction, right up there.”
Despite the accolades, Mr. Thomas seems somewhat wary, even uneasy, about embracing his good fortune. He wondered whether his triumph should be attributed solely to the merits of his novel or whether other, nonliterary motives may also have been in play.
“My role now is some noble savage,” he said, “some person who has risen to grace from some sort of strange beginnings.” Or as he put it at another point in an interview Friday afternoon at a coffee shop in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, near his home, “If you don’t have a physical deformity and are of above average intelligence and are black or from any marginalized minority, you become a poster boy for uplift.”
<span style="font-style: italic">cant believe people ask him dat</span>
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