British novelist Andrew Miller has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 1999, the world's richest fiction prize, for Ingenious Pain, published here by Harcourt and in paperback by Harvest.
His novel was chosen for the prize, which is worth $150,000, by an international panel of judges from Sweden, South Africa, Canada, Australia, Ireland and the U.S. The book, about an 18th-century man unable to feel pain, either physical or emotional, is the 39-year-old author's first novel.
Miller won over a formidable list of nominees, including the U.K.'s Jim Crace and Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Francisco Goldman and Cynthia Ozick from the U.S.; Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) from Japan; and Germany's Bernhard Schlink (The Reader). The award will be presented at a Dublin ceremony June 12.
