OMEGA PRIZE

On en a déjà parlé - et on en reparlera.

Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen tonight secured a double honour from the Independent foreign fiction prize for his novel Omega Minor. The £10,000 purse has hitherto been divided between 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.

"It's always amazing when people like your work, and it's absolutely amazing when four leading intellectuals say it's the best book they've read all year," Verhaeghen said after learning of his victory. However, while he is delighted to receive the endorsement, he has decided not to take the money. "Part of this book is about the rise and aftermath of Fascism in Nazi Germany. And it's hard to miss the analogous things happening in the US. I refused the Flemish Culture award after I realised around $5,000 (£2,555) of the winnings would go to the US treasury. So this time, I decided to give the money to the American Civil Liberties Union, which works for civil rights. The money won't be liable for tax."
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.

The book has sold well in Germany, Holland and France and his publishers will be hoping for repeat success in the UK in the wake of the prize. Antonia Byatt, director of literature strategy at award sponsor Arts Council England and the non-voting chair of the judges, said: "I am delighted Paul Verhaeghen has won ... It is a highly ambitious novel which tackles some of the major issues of our time. He deserves such recognition in England, not only for his remarkable writing but also for his huge achievement in translating his own work."

Verhaeghen said he undertook to translate his own work after the Flemish Fund for Literature commissioned some trial translations from other people, and I didn't recognise my own voice. It was the first time I realised I could have an English voice." The resulting book, he explained, "is maybe more American than the original, but I can still recognise it as my novel."

The judges for the prize were literary editor of the Independent, Boyd Tonkin; writer and teacher Abdulrazak Gurnah; literary editor of Le Monde Florence Noiville; and Arts Council England literature officer Kate Griffin.

Boyd Tonkin described the book as "one of those fantastic, big, rich exciting novels that turn up from time to time. If you're looking for comparisons, they would be the Don DeLillo of Underworld and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It is vast and sprawling - and I think it's OK to say that it is quite uneven, because 80% of it is absolutely brilliant."