Impac prize judge: how we chose this year's winner

Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez is not a lone talent, but part of a rising generation of authors just hitting their stride

'Taut and moving' … Juan Gabriel Vásquez, winner of the 2014 Impac award for The Sound of Things Falling. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

Judging the International Impac prize – the €100,000 (£80,500) Dublin literary award that is the richest for a single novel written in, or translated into, English – is an excellent way to take the pulse of global literature. This year's winning novel, The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, published by Bloomsbury in Anne McLean's superb translation and named at a ceremony in the Irish capital on Thursday, rose from a longlist of 152 titles in 17 original languages. These are nominated not by publishers, whose choices may be steered by commercial dictates, but by more than 100 libraries, or communities of readers, around the world.


Five of the 10 shortlisted books are novels in translation, including A Death in the Family, part one of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett), and Three Strong Women, by Marie NDiaye (translated from the French by John Fletcher). The shortlisted English-language writers ranged from Australian Michelle de Kretser to David Park of Northern Ireland. All their books persisted in our imaginations. Yet it was soon apparent to me and my fellow jurors – authors Tash Aw, Catherine Dunne, Giles Foden, and Maciej Świerkocki - that the laurels would go to a Latin-American writer.
More