For the first time in its 11-year history, the €100,000 International Impac Dublin Literary Award has been won by an Irish writer. Colm Tóibín (51) has, with his 2004 Booker runner-up The Master, succeeded in taking the world's richest literary prize for a single work of fiction.
The award, which was presented to the author in Dublin yesterday, marks the ultimate accolade for this polished, psychologically driven period narrative based on the life of the acknowledged supreme cartographer of consciousness, US writer Henry James.
The Master, which received excellent reviews on publication and featured as the Books of the Year choice of many writers, was described by John Updike as "a marvel of lightly worn research and modulated tone". It has already been honoured in France, taking the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and in the US, where it won the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
Elegantly European in tone, it triumphs through its understatement, irony and subtle sense of distance. At no time does Tóibín presume to enter the heart and soul of James. Instead, he pursues a subtle exploration of the ambivalent desire for love that preoccupied a wary James. This is an international novel graced by insight and discretion, which makes inspired use of source material in recreating key episodes from James's life.
It is the fifth work of fiction by Tóibín. Born in Wexford in 1955, he emerged through the ranks of late 1970s and 1980s Dublin journalism, serving as editor of In Dublin and an earlier incarnation of current affairs magazine Magill. He has written several works of nonfiction, including a recent study of Lady Gregory, and is an established commentator and essayist, contributing to publications in Britain and the US.
Outspoken on issues such as divorce, abortion and most other things, he was within minutes of the Impac announcement offering an assessment of the Haughey legacy on RTÉ radio.
Tóibín has been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker prize; for The Blackwater Lightship in 1999 and in 2004 with The Master, which lost out to Alan Hollinghurst's overrated contemporary London social comedy, The Line of Beauty.
Hollinghurst may have won, but it was The Master that quickly became established as a major literary novel.
Since the announcement of the 10-strong shortlist in March, this year's Impac had three specific front-runners - alongside The Master were Ronan Bennett's starkly allegorical study of fear and paranoia, Havoc, In Its Third Year, which was set in Puritan 1630s England; and London-based Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers, a powerful, complex story about a Pakistani community in present-day Britain. All the three had been well reviewed and appeared on the 2004 Booker longlist. Only Tóibín progressed to the shortlist.
He should have won that Booker. Instead he has secured the prize that three years ago eluded his friend John McGahern.
No one could accuse Impac of parochialism - this award is as international as it claims. Readers have been presented with good books from all over the world.
It did seem that McGahern would win with what was to be his final novel, That They May Face The Rising Sun.
Instead, the political and cultural weight of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's frenetic thriller, My Name Is Red, an opulent exploration of East meets West which also confronted the multiple tensions of art and truth, won.
In Aslam, Tóibín also faced a worthy challenger and had himself selected Maps for Lost Lovers as his Book of the Year in 2004.
It is a novel of many stories and is dominated by the vicious killing of a young girl, murdered by her brothers for defiling their family honour.
Her crime is her choice of a lover. Other characters in the novel also suffer for love, but this central incident articulates an immense moral outrage.
While Salman Rushdie has made a career of satirising and ridiculing his culture, Aslam has exposed the realities of Islamic tradition in what is a beautiful, courageous and important novel that avoids bald polemic.
Tóibín now joins what is an impressive roll call of Impac winners that also includes Romanian Herta Müller's The Land of Green Plums (1998), Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief (2000), Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun's This Blinding Absence of Light and Edward P Jones, who last year became the first winner from the US with his novel The Known World.