OnTheTown: Edward P Jones, the winner of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, was presented with cheque for €100,000 at a gala dinner in the Round Room of the Mansion House in Dublin this week.
"My only regret is that my mother, who died 30 years ago this year, is not here to see this, to know what all her hard work came to," he said after Dr James B Irwin, chairman of Impac, an international management consultancy, presented him with the prize. "When you grow up with a lot of deficits you come to believe that having a job is the beginning and the end of everything. When you don't have a job, you tend to feel untethered. Even today there's a part of me that feels untethered from the world and maybe in a month or two this will hit me - now it's all a dream."
Canadian writer Nino Ricci, one of the judges who read the 147 books nominated by readers around the world, said: "I loved it from the start. It was the first book I read and it stayed with me through the whole process. It's a work of tremendous imagination."
"When a book stays as long in the heart and in the mind as this one does, there has to be something brilliant about it," said fellow judge, poet Rita Ann Higgins.
Another judge, French writer Agnés Desarthe, said it was "the flow" of the winning novel, The Known World that she loved.
Among those who attended the presentation dinner were three winners of the Impac Young Writers Awards: Tipratri Saenkhom (18) from Thailand, Eve Teo (17) from Malaysia, and Anna Sukis (16) from Finland.