DUBLIN, Ireland – Newfoundland author Michael Crummey has won the prestigious for his novel,
The Adversary. The awards comes with a €100,000 cheque.(CDN $156,420.) and was announced today at Dublin’s Merrion Square Park.
The novel was published by Knopf Canada and tells the story of two siblings who own competing trading companies in a remote part of Newfoundland in the 19th century.
In an isolated outport on Newfoundland’s northern coastline, a ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar’s largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world. As their unshakeable animosity spirals further each year, the community is increasingly divided and even the innocents in Mockbeggar find themselves forced to take sides, with devastating consequences. The Adversary is a dark, enthralling novel about love and its limitations, the corruption of power and the power of corruption.
“Michael Crummey’s The Adversary compellingly and convincingly immerses its readers in a world previously lost to fiction, and almost lost to memory: a Newfoundland outport from the early years of the colony, connected to the world outside only by the occasional supply ship,” said the jury in a press statement.
Crummey is also the author of the novels The Innocents, Sweetland and Galore and the poetry collections Arguments with Gravity and Passengers. Two of Crummey’s novels have been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction — Sweetland in 2014 and Galore in 2009.
The prize is awarded annually by the Dublin City Council to a single work of international fiction in English, or a translation to English.
