Gerbrand Bakker

Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker has won the 2010 IMPAC prize for his debut novel, The Twin, published in the United States by fellow independent publisher — and Brooklynite — Archipelago Books.

Archipelago’s website says of the book that “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.”

Bakker will share the 100,000.00 Euro prize (approximately $123,782.55 US) with his translator David Colmer.

“The Bakker win is significant on several counts,” writes Eileen Battersby in an Irish Times report. “A good shortlist had been selected from an outstanding longlist of submissions that included two major Chinese novels; Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem and Ma Jian’s Bejing Coma . Neither made it to the shortlist. Bakker’s major threats came from Pulitzer Prize winning Marilynne Robinson for Home and the Irish writer Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a novel that had been expected to win the 2008 Booker prize but failed to make that shortlist, subsequently was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel award and has been praised by Barrack Obama.”

According to a report in the Edmonton Journal, “The International Impac Dublin literary award is organised by Dublin city libraries, and is open to novels written in any language, provided they have been published in English. This year 156 titles from 43 countries were put forward by 163 public libraries.”

The IMPAC shortlist also included Muriel Barbery’s international bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog published stateside by another New York independent house, Europa Editions. The Twin had also been shortlisted for Three Percent’s 2010 Best Translated Book Award — won by Gail Hareven for The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu, and published by Melville House.

Patron of the award, Lord Mayor of Dublin Emer Costello, said that winning would mean that “this beautifully written Dutch novel will come to the attention of readers worldwide.”

Although the IMPAC is the world’s richest literary prize for a single novel (unlike the Nobel, which is ostensibly awarded for a body of work) it lags behind in international recognition. Will the prize drive readers to the stores? Contacted via email, Jill Schoolman, publisher of Archipelago, says “That would be nice! Let’s hope…”