Joan Thomas IMPAC longlist nomination
By Eric Hill • Nov 17th, 2009 • Category: Editor's Picks, Goose Lane AuthorsJoan Thomas’s Reading by Lightning has just been named one of 12 Canadian books included among this year’s nominees for the €100,000 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award — the world’s most lucrative literary prize. Last month, Reading by Lightning was awarded the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, Thomas’s third prize this year. Reading by Lightning also won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean, and the Manitoba Reads contest. The IMPAC, which sees librarians around the world nominate their favourite titles for the award, has longlisted 156 books this year, spanning 46 countries and 18 languages. Judges, including the Carnegie Medal-winning author Anne Fine, will now select a shortlist from the 156 books, which will be announced on 14 April 2010. The winner will be announced 17 June 2010.
Below is the IMPAC page’s information on Joan Thomas’s work:
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The 2010 Award
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Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas
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Nominated by:
Publisher of Nominated Edition:
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| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
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ABOUT THE BOOK
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| Lily Piper and her family live in an ephemeral world, due to collapse any moment when the Lord comes to pluck His faithful from the drought-ravaged Prairie. Lily tries to be ready, but she is restless, not the daughter she feels her mother wants. As she tries to invent herself, she conjures, too, an imagined past for her beloved father in an effort to understand him and the demons he battles. In her teens, Lily is sent to England to care for her grandmother and further explores the delicious question of who she might become. She falls in love with her adopted cousin, learns to experience life in all its ambiguity, and waits with the rest of England for the Second World War to start - until the news she has been dreading arrives on the doorstep, and she is called home to face a future she thought she had escaped. Reading by Lightning is a Bildungsroman of great wit and depth. Thomas’s prose is wry and intimate, elegant and devastatingly funny. Her engrossing story of Lily Piper tells us something of how we can make sense of a future when the future is some-thing we can hardly imagine. (From Publisher). |
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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| Joan Thomas has been a regular book reviewer for the Globe and Mail for more than a decade. Her essays, stories, and articles have been published in numerous journals and magazines including Prairie Fire, Books in Canada, and the Winnipeg Free Press. She has won a National Magazine Award, co-edited Turn of the Story: Canadian Short Fiction on the Eve of the Millennium, and has served on the editorial boards of Turnstone Press and Prairie Fire Magazine. She lives in Winnipeg. |
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LIBRARIANS’ COMMENTS |
| Winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Canadian and Caribbean Category); Consistently positive reviews using words such as “tunning, elegant, precise, complex, extraordinary, exceptional, rich and believable”; the personal favourite of our judging panel, who enjoyed the compelling character of Lily and the elegant writing style; and finally an irresistible chance to promote the excellent product of a small New Brunswick publisher to an international readership. |
Eric Hill is the editor of branta.
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