Society's Child
"I don't feel neglected today. I don't know who put that Wiki page up, but I think whoever did will have to rethink that," he laughs. "I was shocked. I had completely given up hope that I was going to win it. But I'm over the shock now and enjoying myself - very much."
The International Dublin literary award, previously known as the Impac, operates with a slight air of mystery: a ridiculously long longlist (150 books this year) is picked by librarians around the world, from Barbados to Estonia, who hand their selection over to a panel of authors to bestow the grand boon on one unsuspecting writer.

Beck Dorey-Stein, who admits she had a fling with a White House staffer Jason Wolf, who broke her heart
After answering an Obama administration's Craigslist ad for a stenographer, the then-25-year-old Dorey-Stein quit her five part-time jobs after she was hired to work in the White House in 2012 - joining a pool of 13 reporters from the White House press corps to travel with the president, recording everything he said and then transcribing it for the press office and presidential archive.
'Traveling with the president is like summer camp on steroids - a week on the road is like a year at home', Dorey-Stein writes.
Hundreds of horrified travelers held hands believing they were about to die as the aircraft suddenly dropped over the Pacific Ocean on Sunday.
The dramatic ordeal afflicting passengers on the QF94 from Los Angeles to Melbourne is understood to have been caused by the vortex, or "wake turbulence" caused by another aircraft which took off just two minutes earlier.
QF94 passenger Janelle Wilson told The Australian the "three-quarters-full" plane suddenly entered a "free fall nosedive ... a direct decline towards the ocean" for about 10 seconds.
"It was between 1½ and two hours after we left LA and all of a sudden the plane went through a violent turbulence and then completely up-ended and we were nosediving," Wilson told the newspaper yesterday.
The IDF's actions "highlight the need for the International Criminal Court to open a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine," the New-York-based global human rights watchdog said in a statement on Wednesday.
HRW's call came shortly before the UN General Assembly adopted a nonbinding resolution that condemns Israel's use of excessive force and calls for measures to protect Palestinians in Gaza.
Tamara Pletnyova, head of the family, women and children's affairs committee, argued that even if these relationships led to marriage, women or their children would inevitably be taken abroad by the man.
"Even if they get married, they'll take them away, then she doesn't know how to get back," Ms Pletnyova said on radio station Govorit Moskva. "Then they come to me in the committee, girls crying that their baby was taken away, was taken, and so on.
"I'd like people in our country to marry for love, no matter what nationality as long as they are Russian citizens who will build a family, live peacefully, have children and raise them."
She said women who had babies with foreigners around the time of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow often "suffered" as single mothers.
"It's good if it's one race, but if it's another race, then they really did. We should have our own babies," Ms Pletnyova said.
Comment: The Chairman of the State Duma Committee for Sports, Tourism and Youth, Mikhail Degtyarev, contradicted Pletnyova:
"The more World Cup love stories we have, the more people from different countries will fall in love with that game," Degtyarev said, according to Moskva Agency.
"The more children will be born [from that love], the better. Because many years from now, those children will remember that their parents' love story started here in Russia during the 2018 World Cup. Let's hope that the World Cup will give us many love stories, interracial couples and children."
Larcenies increased about 9 percent by 2016, or about 135 more thefts per 100,000 residents than if tougher penalties had remained, according to results of a study by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California released Tuesday.
Thefts from motor vehicles accounted for about three-quarters of the increase. San Francisco alone recorded more than 30,000 auto burglaries last year, which authorities largely blamed on gangs. Shoplifting may be leveling off, researchers found, but there is no sign of a decline in thefts from vehicles.
The pair had stopped to ask for directions when they were killed; their deaths filmed by attackers who then shared the gory videos online.
One of the victims, 29-year-old musician Nilotpal Das, can be seen covered in blood and pleading for his life.
Mr Das had travelled extensively through India and was described by his grieving father in Indian media as "broad-minded and amicable".
His friend, 30-year-old Abhijeet Nath, was also killed.
The officer is a Pennsylvania state trooper who is currently enjoying anonymity from the department. He and another trooper were at a residence last week to arrest Preston Weakland, the 14-year-old boy in the video below, for running away.
With up to 1,000 police officers, soldiers, and riot police set to take part in June, the drill will be Austria's largest ever border patrol exercise, according to Kronen Zeitung, Austria's best-selling newspaper.
The announcement came following a security conference in Slovenia at which police chiefs from countries along the Balkans migration routes warned they had seen a significant upsurge in the number of border crossings.
Banks was giving evidence to parliament's so called Fake News Committee in a room where the number of likeable people were in short supply. Banks and his business partner Andy Wigmore were fresh on the grill as the backers and brains of Leave.EU, the Nigel Farage backed group which did as much as anyone to win the Brexit referendum for the Eurosceptics.
Their presence comes in the wake of Banks being accused in the Sunday Times of having links to Russia and suggestions he was used by the Kremlin to influence Brexit, but then again most people who sit before this committee are accused of some kind of links to Moscow. It's always the bear in the room.














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