The Washington Postreports that author Joseph O'Neill has won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for his novel Netherland, which is set in a post-9/11 New York City.
"No better mind has gone to work on where we are post-9/11," said Lee Abbott, one of three writers who served as PEN/Faulkner judges. As for cricket, Abbott said, he has never watched a game, but "I'd love to see one in O'Neill's company -- and he makes me feel that I did."
O'Neill, 45, is an Irish-born immigrant who sought out New York's cricket subculture when he arrived there in 1998. After a couple of seasons competing with cricket-loving immigrants from South Asia, the West Indies and elsewhere, he said in an interview, he realized there was "a story to be written about this marginalized and emblematically invisible world."
O'Neill's Netherland was also a book some critics thought should have been on the Man Bookper Prize shortlist. The PEN/Faulkner website can be found here.
