Impac prize goes to 'consummate wordsmith' Jim Crace for Harvest

The English novelist Jim Crace has won the €100,000 Impac Dublin literary award, leaving him free, he says, to retire and consider writing “as a hobby”.

The 69-year-old writer took the prize, one of the world’s richest for a single work of fiction, with Harvest, the story of the last days of an English village where an age-old way of life is ending, and where three mysterious strangers trigger a series of cataclysmic events. Harvest was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize two years ago, but was beaten to that award by New Zealand author Eleanor Catton for The Luminaries. This time round, Crace’s novel beat works by writers including Richard Flanagan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Colum McCann.

Crace, who last year won the $150,000 (£95,000) Windham Campbell prize, has threatened to step back from writing before, telling Mariella Frostrup in 2013 that Harvest would mark his retirement as a novelist. This time, though, he says he’s still writing. But, for now at least, he plans to do it only for himself.

“Before writing Harvest I was writing a novel that failed at 40,000 words, and I had to abandon it … If you owe a book and you’ve been paid for it and it’s not going well, you have really put yourself into a difficult place. When I was writing that failed book, I was miserable. And feeling a lot of unpleasant pressure … Then I made the decision to retire. And then – lo and behold – Harvest came along. But I was still clinging to the idea that I would retire,” Crace said.

Harvest, he said, “had to be written”, because he was under contract to produce another novel for his publisher. “But now I owe a book to nobody. So I’ve retired. We’ve bought a house, and we’ve made a garden, and now I feel I’m doing what a lot of retired people do, and that is taking up writing as a hobby. It sounds like I’m joking, but what I feel is that I will do exactly what I want to do, and as it happens, I am actually writing a new book,” he said.

The new novel is “about poverty and tourism”, and Crace has taken no publisher’s advance for it. And he has no plans to accept further commercial commitments, despite being approached as recently as last week. “What has changed is that with the level of success of Harvest, and these prizes, it has to be a grand book: or it doesn’t get published,” he said. “I will not publish a new book unless it hits hard. I can make the choice. I don’t have to publish a book I am not entirely happy with.”

Standing behind his new home in the Worcestershire countryside, Crace described the moment of inspiration for Harvest. “There was this ridge and furrow. Its history has patterned the landscape in undulations. It was very beautiful. But you also have to remind yourself that it is evidence of dispossession. So you have two things. Beauty and dispossession,” he said. “It’s about how the landscape possesses both of these things at the same time.”

For the Impac prize, librarians from around the world are invited to nominate novels that are either written in English, or translated into English. Three works in translation also shortlisted for this year’s prize, by Moroccan writer Mahi Binebine, Brazilian Bernardo Kucinski, and Russian-born French author Andreï Makine.

Judges including the writers Daniel Hahn and Kate Pullinger chose their winner from librarians’ 142 nominations - Harvest had been put forward by Universitätsbibliothek Bern in Switzerland and LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library in Tallahassee Florida – calling it “a powerful and compelling novel”.

Harvest is set in late summer in an unnamed part of England where the harvest has been gathered, and where the Enclosure Act is beginning to remove land from the reach of the common man. Three strangers arrive on the outskirts of the village, and a fire breaks out in the barn owned by the lord of the manor.

It is narrated by Walter Thirsk, whom judges said “draws us right into the dark heart of this village where betrayal, cruelty, greed, cowardice and lust are ever lurking – vices that have been, and always will be with us – and thereby bringing a contemporary relevance to the novel”.

“At times, Harvest reads like a long prose poem; it plays on the ear like a river of words. But then again, Jim Crace is a consummate wordsmith; his understanding of human nature is uncanny and he never drops a stitch from start to finish,” they said in their citation. “All human life is here: its graces and disgraces and there is life too in every small stone, flower and blade of grass.”

Crace said he received the message that he had won while on the Isles of Scilly, “where I hardly have any email or phone reception, but something crept through and it said to phone urgently.”

“When you win that kind of money … I haven’t thought I’m going to go and spend it. My immediate reaction is, more years of security. I’m English. I don’t talk about money. But I’ve earned my living as a freelance writer for more than 40 years now. I have a habit of squirreling away,” he said. “And it’s great to get that kind of message in a place where there’s nowhere to spend your money. It was double lemonades all round.”

• This article was corrected on June 17 to clarify that Eleanor Catton won the Man Booker prize in 2013 for The Luminaries.