2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel Omega Minor. The £10,000 prize is usually divided between the author and English translator for 'an exceptional work' of foreign language fiction by a living author. But this year Verhaeghen, who himself translated the book, is entitled to take the full prize for himself - although he does not plan to do so.

Moving back and forth through the last century, Omega Minor, translated from the Dutch, is a story of love and death on the grandest possible scale. Its whirlwind plot takes in Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and characters including neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, a Holocaust survivor going over his trauma with a young psychologist and an Italian postgraduate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe.

The book is Paul Verhaeghen's second novel and his first to be published in English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist where his work focuses on memory and ageing. He currently lives in Atlanta, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Read about it in the article in the Guardian and the article in the Independent.

Published: 08/05/2008

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