The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker wins 2010 IMPAC Prize

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0617/breaking58.html
Impac 2010 winner announced

Related Audio

Audio analysis: Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent

Download this clip (MP3 format)

EILEEN BATTERSBY, Literary Correspondent

Gerbrand Bakker has become the first Dutch writer to win the International Impac Dublin Literary Award from a shortlist of seven other titles including Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland .

Bakker (48) won the world’s richest literary prize for a single work of fiction after a long selection process begun late last year when more than 160 titles were nominated by libraries across the world



SEE Reviews---
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/niederld/bakkerg.htm

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-twin--by-gerbrand-bakker-trans-david-colmer-836320.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/29/twin-gerbrand-bakker-review




http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/17/gerbrand-bakker-impac-prize

Dutch gardener reaps Impac prize

Gerbrand Bakker's 'wonderful' debut novel, set on a bleak farm, has beaten established authors to clinch the world's biggest literary prize, of €100,000

• 
  
• see more at The Guardian:

• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 June 2010 19.30 BST

Bridging cultures ... Dublin's city libraries organise the Impac's worldwide literary search Photograph: Chris Bacon/PA

A "restrained, sparely written" debut novel by a Dutch author and part-time gardener has beaten Marilynne Robinson's Orange prize-winning Home and Joseph O'Neill's Booker-longlisted Netherland to win the world's richest book prize, the International Impac Dublin literary award.

1. The Twin
2. by Gerbrand Bakker
3. 288pp,
4. 

1. Buy The Twin at the Guardian bookshop

Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin (Boven is het stil), in which protagonist Helmer is forced to return to his family's small farm in the bleak Dutch countryside after his twin brother dies in a car accident, was named winner of the €100,000 Impac prize in Dublin this evening. The award is unique in that public libraries around the world nominate titles they think should win – The Twin was proposed by libraries in Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and Eindhoven – after which an international judging panel select the winner, this year from a shortlist of eight.

The Twin, a novel by the Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker has won this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return from university life to take over his brother’s role on the small family farm, resigning himself to spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow.’

The novel begins thirty years later with Helmer moving his invalid father upstairs to have him out of the way as he sparsely redecorates the downstairs, finally making it his own. Then one day Riet, the woman who had once been engaged to marry Helmer’s twin, appears and asks if she and her troubled eighteen-year-old son could come to live with them on the farm.

Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, The Twin is ultimately about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one’s own hands. It chronicles a way of life that has resisted modernity, a world culturally apart yet laden with romantic longing.

Read more: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/06/17/dutch-writer-gerbrand-bakker-wins-2010-impac-dublin-literary-award/#ixzz0r9TFw3sb



Yes The Twin is in our library



See reviews: