World's 'richest literary prize' goes to Jim Crace's Harvest

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last updated 17 June 2015

Author Jim Crace is taking home about $157,000 for his novel, Harvest, the winner of the 2015 IMPAC Dublin literary award — the "richest literary prize in the world."

The IMPAC prize is notable for being post-dated two years from the date of publication; Harvest was released by Picador in 2013. Librarians around the world are invited to nominate novels for the prize so long as the works are in English, or translated into English.

Previous winners include Herta Müller's Land of Green Plums in 1998, Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red in 2003, and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin in 2011.

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From The The New York Times review of Harvest:

To describe Harvest as another novel of social decomposition might suggest that Crace is a writer who repeats himself. Far from it. While his imagination feeds off tumultuous change, he roams so widely across epochs and cultures that his 11 novels feel infinitely various.…Crace's narrator, Walter Thirsk, inhabits an agrarian community, a village that time seems to have forgotten, sealed against the wider world. Sealed, that is, until the novel’s opening scenes, when covetous, irruptive forces begin to smash through those barriers. [The New York Times]

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.