Novelist Toibin wins IMPAC prize

Colm Toibin won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel “The Master,” becoming the first Irish writer to win the world’s most valuable prize for a single work of fiction.

Toibin was picked for the 100,000-euro ($126,000) award from a shortlist of 10, for his novel about writer Henry James. Published in 2004, the book also won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger for the best foreign novel published in France.

“This probing portrayal of Henry James is not merely an outstanding narrative,” the judges said in a statement on the IMPAC website. “Its preoccupations are truth and the elusiveness of intimacy, and from such preoccupations emerge this patient, beautiful, exposure of loss, and the price of the pursuit of perfection.”