Another début novel clinches the world’s richest book prize

A WORK OF TRANSLATED FICTION has won the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Gerbrand Bakker of the Netherlands has won the world’s richest book prize for his début novel, The Twin (Harvill Secker, 2008/Vintage, 2009/Archipelago Books, 2009). It is translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. The prize-winning novel was first published in Dutch, Boven is het stil, in 2006.

The panel of judges found the novel a convincing piece of fiction. “Though rich in detail, it’s a sparely written story, with the narrator’s odd small cruelties, laconic humour and surprising tendernesses emerging through a steady, well-paced, unaffected style,” said the judges. “With quiet mastery the story draws in the reader. The writing is wonderful: restrained and clear, and studded with detail of farm rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch countryside.”

The Twin is the third début novel in a row to win the prize, following Michael Thomas’s Man Gone Down in 2009 and Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game in 2008.