First time novelist Edward P Jones has won the 10th Impac Dublin Literature Award.
The American author won the prize for The Known World,a story recalling slavery in the American south in the 19th century.
Receiving the award at Dublin City Hall this afternoon, Jones revealed he had missed his flight from the US last night and had only arrived a short time before the ceremony and not yet unpacked his luggage.
"My suit is rumpled, my shirt is rumpled but my heart is soaring," he said in a short speech after the receiving the award from the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Michael Conaghan and the chairman of Impac, Dr James B Irwin.
Central to the story, is black slave Henry Townsend. Under the tutelage of his powerful white master, William Robbins, he becomes a successful plantation owner and keeper of slaves himself.
Upon his death, his widow, Caldonia, gripped by grief, cannot maintain order on the plantation and the internal social order breaks down.
The narrative alternates between the time of Townsend’s death and the events that unfold afterwards. It chronicles the lives of those living on and around the plantation in pre-civil war Virgina and gives insight into the complexity of human relationships that result form slavery.
The Known Worldhas garnered rave reviews around the world with critics comparing it favourably to the work of Toni Morrisson and William Faulkner.
Jones previously won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the US National Book Award for his debut collection of stories, Lost in the City.
The Known World, his first novel, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The International Impac Dublin Literary Award is the largest prize of its kind, with a first prize of €100,000.
It is considered the most international of major prizes as judges consider any works translated into English. Previous winners have come from Turkey, Morrocco, Spain, France, Germany, Canada Australia and Britain.
Impac Dublin award co-ordinator, Linda Fitzgerald, said the international flavour to the prize should be noted on its tenth anniversary: "It's not quite at the speed of Phileas Fogg, but we've been around the world in ten years," she said.
This year's shortlist did not include elligible works by some of the giants of the literary world, such as JM Coetzee, Gunther Grass and Margaret Attwood although Jones victory was not considered a suprise.
The other shortlisted authors were: South Africans Damon Galgut and Diane Awerbuck, Douglas Glover and Frances Itani from Canada, Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg, Norwegian Lars Saabye Christensen's, Germany’s Christoph Hein, American Jonathan Lethem and Shirley Hazzrad from Australia.
Jones is the first American to win the award.