Hage wins IMPAC prize with Lebanon childhood novel

A tale of childhood and maturity in wartorn Beirut beat a host of other stories from around the world to win one of English fiction's richest prizes.

• Lebanese novelist Rawi Hage’s “De Niro’s Game”, one of 137 novels on a long list nominated by readers at 162 public libraries from 45 countries, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the prize body said on Thursday.
• Set up 13 years ago by Dublin City Council and the Dublin-headquarterd U.S. company IMPAC, the prize is worth 100,000 euros ($154,300).
• “Ringing with insight and authenticity the novel shows how war can envelope lives,” the IMPAC panel said of Hage’s work.
• “It’s a game where there are no winners, just degrees of survival,” the panel of judges who selected Hage from a short list of eight said in a statement.
• Two other Arab contenders had made the shortlist for this year’s prize: Arab-Israeli author Sayed Kashua’s novel “Let it Be Morning” and “The Attack” by Yasmina Khadra from Algeria.
• De Niro’s Game, first published in Canada by House of Anansi Press, is told through the eyes of Bassam, as he grows up with his childhood friend George, in wartorn Beirut.
• “As the young men reach adulthood they must choose their futures: to stay in the city and embrace a life of crime or go into exile abroad, alienated from the only existence they have known,” the Dublin City Council statement said.
• Born in 1964, Hage witnessed nine years of Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war, before moving to New York and then Canada.
• “It’s not an autobiographical novel, if anything, it portrays the life of a community through war,” Hage told Reuters.
• He said he had not been back to Lebanon in 10 years.
• “There are hard moments in that kind of displacement,” he said. “(But) it makes you some kind of a cosmopolitan person and you can get more tolerant.”
• The other books on the final shortlist were “Winterwood” by Ireland’s Patrick McCabe; “The Speed of Light” by Spaniard Javier Cercas; “The Sweet and Simple Kind” by Yasmine Gooneratne from Sri Lanka; “Dreams of Speaking” by Australian Gail Jones and “The Woman Who Waited” by Andrei Makine, a Russian.
• Last year’s prize was won by Norway’s Per Petterson and his translator Anne Born, for the novel “Out Stealing Horses”.