On Wednesday May 19th 2010 JG Farrell was announced as the winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize with his novel Troubles. It won by a clear majority, winning 38% of the votes by the international reading public, more than double the votes cast for any other book on the shortlist.
Troubles which tells the comic yet melancholic tale of an English Major, Brendan Archer, who in 1919 goes to County Wicklow in Ireland to meet the woman whom he believes he may be engaged to marry. From the viewpoint of the crumbling Majestic Hotel at Kilnalough he watches Ireland's fight for independence from Britain.
The Lost Man Booker is a one-off prize to honour the books which missed out on the opportunity to win the Booker Prize in 1970. In 1971, just two years after it began, the Booker Prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became - as it is today - a prize for the best novel of the year of publication. As a result a wealth of fiction published for much of 1970 fell through the net.
Farrell is now being re-discovered by a new generation of readers. He came back into the public eye last year when he was short listed for his novel the Siege of Krishnapur for the Best of the Booker prize winners over its 40 year history.
Salman Rushdie won the Best of the Booker with his Midnight's Children and he said of Farrell, “had he not sadly died so young, there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary.”
Jim Farrell died on August 11th 1979 in a fishing accident on the Sheeps Head Peninsula in the southwest of Ireland. He had only moved to his new home near Kilchrohane earlier that year.
Cork University Press published JG Farrell in His Own Words Selected Letters and Diaries edited by Lavina Greacen in 2009. These letters and diaries give a fascinating insight into the mind of this great writer.
Comments