LONDON, Nov 7 — The third novel from American author Joshua Ferris, “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour,” has won the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize ahead of strong competition.
The £30,000 (RM158,790) prize is awarded for the previous year’s best published or best produced literary work in the English language, whether that be in the form of a novel, poem or poetry collection, or play.
Elegible authors are aged 39 or under, in tribute to iconoclastic Welsh writer Dylan Thomas (1914-1953).
Ferris’s May release had previously been shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, and, at the National Waterfront Museum in Thomas’ hometown of Swansea, was declared prizewinner in a field of strong contenders.
The conflicted main character of “To Rise Again...” ends up a reluctant amateur private investigator, in pursuit of his own mysterious online doppleganger, but soon finds that the fraudulent virtual identities created in his name may be more appealing than he himself actually is.
Elizabeth Catton’s “The Luminaries” won the Man Booker Prize in 2013, while the author of “A Girl Is a Half Formed Thing,” Eimear McBride, was also on the list, having won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year.
Also nominated were Russian-born Alaskan Kseniya Melnik (“Snow in May”), Jamaican multi-hyphenate Kei Miller (“The Cartographer Tires to Map a Way to Zion”), Welsh writer, actor and TV presenter Owen Sheers (“Mametz”) and London-based Englishwoman Naomi Wood (“Mrs. Hemingway”). — AFP-Relaxnews
