The winner of the 2000 Award, Wide Open by British writer Nicola Barker, was announced on Wednesday, May 9th 2000 in Dublin Castle by The Right Honourable The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Mary Freehill.

The author, when expressing her delight and amazement at winning the Award said "all the books shortlisted are absolutely brilliant: I'm humbled to be associated with them in any way".

In a statement the judging panel said - "Wide Open is word perfect, witty and ironic.....The author's focus on marginal lives and on the importance of the dispossesed and the apparently mad persuade us finally that Wide Open possesses a manic energy and taut eloquence worthy of a large, serious and global readership."

ISBN: 0571195660 (UK); 0880016329 (USA)

Nominated by:
Deichmanske Bibliothek, Oslo, Norway.

About...

Fifty miles to the south and east of London, poking out into the estuary of the river Thames, the Isle of Sheppey is a forgotten, misty backwater. There's a prison, some wading birds and a small nudist beach. In front of this salty, blasted backdrop, Nicola Barker conjures up an imaginative landscape of breathtaking scope and audacity.
Nicola Barker was born in 1966. She lives and works in Hackney, London. She is the author of two collections of stories, Love Your Enemies (winner of the David Highman Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Award for Fiction) and Heading Inland ( winner of the Mail on Sunday John Llewellyn Rhys Prize ), and two other novels, Reversed Forecast and Small Holdings.

Here's what the members of the Reading Group based at our Raheny branch library think of Wide Open:

The novel is set in the Isle of Sheppy in the Thames estuary and deals with a group of people all of whom are scarred by life or have a secret to hide. Barker's characters are without exception a depressing lot. We have a deserted wife who with her foul-mouthed daughter raises boars for a living, two brothers who as young boys have been sexually abused by their father, an ex-prisoner and a pornographer. The location - a wet and dismal area of prefabs and purpose-built chalets adds to the gloom of what I consider a most depressing work.
(Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)

Other books by this author:

Heading Inland (1996) 0571178081 Love Your Enemies
(1993) 0571170218 Reversed Forecast (1995) 0571173026 Small Holdings (1995) 0571175872