Bookplanet: little-known novelist beats famous authors for fattest prize

Norwegian Novelist Wins Impac Award

Per Petterson of Norway and his translator Anne Born were named the winners this week of the 12th International Impac Dublin Literary Award. The $133,000 prize, billed as the world’s richest literary award for a single work of fiction in English, honored Mr. Petterson’s novel “Out Stealing Horses,” about an isolated 67-year-old Norwegian widower whose chance encounter with a character from his youth revives painful memories, Reuters reported. Mr. Petterson, 54, a bookseller before becoming an author, said, “With money like this, it can buy a lot of time to write and no hunger for some time.” Ms. Born will receive a quarter of the prize money. Mr. Petterson’s competition included seven books, by J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Safran Foer, Cormac McCarthy, Peter Hobbs and Sebastian Barry. The short-listed novels were selected from 138 that were nominated by 169 library systems in 49 countries. The winning book, chosen by a panel of five international judges, was cited as a “poignant and moving tale.”