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.
The two frontrunners who so sure-footedly outpaced the strong pack were the Colombian Vásquez, whose novel obliquely traces the forgotten origins and emotional fallout of drug trafficking in one South American country; and Andrés Neuman, an Argentinian brought up in Andalucia, whose Traveller of the Century was published by Pushkin Press in the UK (and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in the US) in a translation from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. The two novels are ostensibly worlds apart in setting and style. Vásquez's literary noir transpires largely in an overcast Colombian capital, Bogotá, and reflects the trauma and terror of a generation – his own – in the 1980s and early 90s, when Pablo Escobar's cocaine cartel declared open war on the government. Neuman's is playfully set in the fictitious, post-Napoleonic German locale of Wandernburg, where two translators fall into forbidden love, in an all-encompassing reinvention of the 19th-century novel through the knowing eyes of the 21st. In the fear and pathos of The Sound of Things Falling, the narrator finds himself impotent. Whereas Traveller of the Century contains – jurors concurred with relish – some of the best sex in fiction of our own century.
Yet in their strengths and similarities, with Neuman still in his 30s, and Vásquez scarcely 40, can be seen not just as lone talents, but as part of a rising generation – grandchildren of the Boom – hitting their stride.
The prize went to Vásquez for his taut, moving novel, with its powerful tragic vision. Our jury commended its consummate use of metaphor to evoke a "world of precarious flight and desperate, last-ditch ambition, in which everything is falling; nothing is secure. Airliners drop out of the sky, marriages crash and burn, daredevil pilots make lethal miscalculations, and family men make flawed choices. Almost anything can be corrupted by the glittering promise of unimaginable wealth – and fate or fluke is the name we give to events beyond our control that lay waste to our soaring dreams."
