Romanian fiction writer wins Dublin's plum

Announcing the winners of literary prizes often inspires more debate than delight. But no one could dispute the quality of Berlin-based Romanian Herta Muller's The Land of Green Plums, winner of this year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Now in its third year, the prize - worth £100,000, with £25,000 of that going to the translator Michael Hofmann - has come of age with a compelling victor which tells the story of Ceausescu's living hell, emerging from a distinguished international short list with a strong Caribbean presence.

St Patrick's Hall, Dublin Castle, offered a suitably dramatic setting for yesterday's event. Flag bearers holding the national colours of the respective countries of the authors flanked the gathering. All speeches stressed Dublin's literary pedigree, its three Nobel literature laureates and the prize's international nature.

Equally international is this year's judging panel which includes the Mexican writer Margo Glantz, Canadian poet Greg Gatenby, the Finnish-Swedish writer Marta Tikkanen, Al Young, poet, essayist and commentator on American culture and Irish poet Paul Muldoon.

Wearing the expressions of people who knew they had picked the right winner, the judges were credited by the chairman of judges, Prof Allen Weinstein, with having "brought the good weather with them. So maybe you would like them to stay on for a while?" Having met the judges, we then met the authors - albeit courtesy of a large screen. The 10 contenders included 1996 Booker Prize winner Graham Swift, South Africa's Andre Brink and Canadian Margaret Atwood.

Some of the authors such as Atwood, her fellow Canadian Guy Vanderhaeghe, Swift and the Guyanan David Dabydeen chose to speak about their respective novels: Alias Grace, The English- man's Boy, Last Orders, and The Counting House. Antiguan Jamaica Kincaid, author of The Autobiography of my Mother, remarked how she always seems to write in the first person. Trinidad's Earl Lovelace, author of Salt, spoke of the need always to write well.

Others spoke more about the prize itself. Brink, whose Imaginings of Sand was among the contenders, expressed his surprise at the amount of money. Muller was direct, saying she would like to win. Lawrence Norfolk, reflecting some of the bizarre humour of his historical saga, The Pope's Rhinoceros which he described as a novel about bribery, declared: "Lawrence Norfolk PLC could certainly do with the money." Saying writing was a cruel life, he said he liked IMPAC because "the winner gets everything and the losers get nothing". Australian David Foster, whose The Glade Within the Grove is another complex saga, was more reticent in his delivery.

Later, across the hall in the room where the wounded James Connolly had lain in 1916, the judges and IMPAC representatives gathered around a phone to inform Muller in Berlin of her win. "I'm glad" she said in English, "I cry" and mentioned friends who had died. Margo Glantz remarked on the novel's courage and anger, adding "but it's not campaigning. It is lyric and cruel and there are wonderful silences." A formal award presentation takes place in Dublin on June 13th.