Joseph O'Connor's acclaimed novel, GHOST LIGHT, has been shortlisted in the Fiction category for the prestigious LA Times Book Prize, 2012. Previous winners in the Fiction category include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, William Boyd, Thomas Keneally, W.G. Sebald, David Malouf, Jennifer Egan, Colm Tóibín and Ian McEwan.
The awards are presented in 10 categories: current interest, fiction, first fiction, biography, history, mystery-thriller, science and technology, graphic novel, poetry and yound adult literature. Other nominees in the category of Fiction this year include, Michael Ondaatje, Julie Otsuka, Edith Pearlman and Alex Shakar.
The Los Angeles Times Book Prize was founded by the late LA Times book editor, Art Seidenbaum. The award for First Fiction was named after him and added a year after his death in 1990. The 32nd annual prize will be awarded on 20 April at USC's Bovard Auditorium in Los Angeles. Please click here for more details.
Published by Harvill Secker in the UK and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, GHOST LIGHT was chosen as Dublin's 'One City, One Book' in 2011 and has been translated into 14 other languages.
GHOST LIGHT follows two intertwined love stories, told through a narrative that moves between London and Ireland in the 1910's and 1950's Dublin. The doomed love affair between the controversial playwright J M Synge and his lover, the actress Molly Allgood is remembered in heartbreaking detail by Molly, now old, poor and barely ekeing out a living in 1950's London.
Earlier this month, Joseph O'Connor was honoured with the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Literature, the prize presented to him by the President of Ireland. His earlier novel, STAR OF THE SEA sold more than a million copies in the British edition alone. The next work he will publish, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?, a collection of stories and a novella, will be published by Harvill Secker later this year.
Praise for GHOST LIGHT:
'It has an astonishing command of voice and period detail, and offers an intimacy with the lives of others which is rare in fiction.' -- Colm Tóibín
'As I read GHOST LIGHT, I found myself going more and more slowly, because I didn't want to miss a single sentence. I found myself calling friends and reading passages aloud to them over the phone. This is a rare experience indeed. It is a rare and wonderful book.' -- Michael Cunningham, author of THE HOURS
'GHOST LIGHT is O'Connor's vivid and sometimes visionary reimagining of the love affair between Molly Allgood and the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge ... In GHOST LIGHT, O'Connor allows himself to ride the wave of Irish eloquence.' -- New York Times Book Review