The biggest literary prize

Good for Boston native Michael Thomas. Yesterday he won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award which brings him about $150,000 for his debut novel, "Man Gone Down.''

The judges' citation starts like this: "We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas’ masterful debut, 'Man Gone Down,' will stay with readers for a long time. He lingers because this extraordinary novel comes to us from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight. Tuned urgently to the way we live now, the winner of the International Dublin IMPAC Prize 2009 is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth.
The first person narrator in 'Man Gone Down' has not fallen, yet. But he stands at a precipice. A black man from Boston married to a white woman with whom he has three children. A once promising Harvard student now broke and working in construction in Brooklyn. When we meet the narrator, he’s had to leave his wife and children with his disapproving mother-in-law, and now has just four days to raise the money necessary to reunite the family and return the children to school."

My former Globe colleague David Mehegan interviewed Thomas back in the winter of 2007, just after "Man Gone Down" had been reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

The award is open to novels written in any language and by authors of any nationality, provided the work has been published in English or English translation. Public libraries around the world nominate books for the award. In fact, it was a library on the island of Barbados that nominated "Man Gone Down."