Does IMPAC have an impact?
Irish Times 12 June 2010

With its huge prize and global span, the Impac should be the most high-profile of literary awards – but it depends on where you live, writes Sinead Glesson

THIS WEEK, the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction was announced (Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna ). Every year, that prize spawns obligatory editorials about the inverse sexism of an all-female prize. Similarly, when the Man Booker shortlist is announced, there is hand-wringing about unjust omissions. Both prizes are well-known, yet both are trumped financially by the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. This year’s winner, announced on June 17th, will net a €100,000 prize, but the award doesn’t have the huge profile of the other contests.

There is something far more democratic about the Impac, with its absence of lobbying or of PR tsunamis by publishers clambering to get their books on the shortlist. Selections are submitted by libraries around the world and more than 150 entries are reduced to a shortlist of eight.

Eoin Purcell, of Irish Publishing News , has mixed views about how the books are chosen. “The fact that it’s selected by libraries is both its strength and its weakness,” he says. “No one has any ownership of the prize because it comes from such a broad spectrum. Even the judging panel – though frequently comprised of big literary names – are not household names.”

When the Orange Prize appointed singer Lily Allen to its judging panel in 2008 it was first accused of dumbing down, and then of snobbery after Allen withdrew before judging began. Founded in 1994, the Impac award is a year older than the Orange Prize but its relative youth isn’t the reason it doesn’t share the same international reputation.

Purcell believes that while the Impac doesn’t have the profile of other prizes, it’s slowly starting to establish itself. “One thing that makes it so important is that it has a global input,” he says. “It’s aggregating the reading tastes from a very broad range of cultures, and it’s good that there’s a prize that actually does that.”
The full thoughtful piece at The Irish Times.
The IMPAC shortlist.