Lebanese author Rawi Hage, writing in his third language, has won the €100,000 Impac Dublin literary award for his novel De Niro’s Game.
The Guardian reports:

Hage, now 44, started working as a novelist relatively late, having trained as a photographer. “Someone told me I should be writing,” he says, after which he started writing a short story. “It kept enlarging, until I realised it had to be a novel.”
The novel draws on his own experience as a child in Beirut during the civil war. “But it’s also a work of fiction, and it has universal themes. Many people who have lived in conflict zones respond to the story.” Hage wrote De Niro’s Game in English, but grew up speaking Arabic and French. It was only as an 18-year-old international student that he began to read English, since when he has spent time living in New York and his current home in Canada.

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Filed under literature, quotations, writing
Related Tags: dublin, fiction, impac, lebanese, novel, prize, rawi hage
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