The Judging Panel for the Year 2000

Alicia Borinsky
Alicia Borinsky, recipient of the 1996 Latino Literature Award for fiction, is a novelist, poet and literary critic who writes in English and Spanish. Her most recent works are the novels Mina cruel, published in English translation as Mean Woman, Suenos del seductor abandonado (Dreams of an Abandoned seducer), Cine continuado (currently being translated into English as All Night Movie), the volume of microfiction Golpes bajos (currently being translated into English as Low Blows), and several volumes of poetry, among them La pareja desmontable (The Collapsible Couple) forthcoming in the UK in November 1999. She has also written several books and articles on Latin American and Comparative literatures and cultures. Alicia Borinsky is Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and Director of Latin American Studies at Boston University.

David Dabydeen
David Dabydeen was born in Guyana, South America, in 1956. He was educated at Cambridge University and University College London, and is now Professor of Literature at the University of Warwick. He has published three collections of poetry, Slave Song (winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize), Coolie Odyssey, and Turner: new and selected poems (1994), and four novels, The Intended, Dissappearance, The Counting House (short-listed for the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and most recently The Harlot's Progress, publised in 1999 by Jonathan Cape.

Suzi Feay
Suzi Feay, the distinguished journalist and critic, has been Literary Editor of The Independent on Sunday in London since 1997 and was previously the paper's Deputy Literary Editor as well as a regular columnist since 1994. In 1998, she served on the judging panel in the novel category for the prestigious Whitbread Prize for Literature. She has written about literature, theatre and the cinema for many other publications in the UK including Time Out and The New Statesman. Suzi Feay was born in Lancashire, is a graduate of the University of Leeds and now lives in London.

Josyane Savigneau
Josyane Savigneau, 48, is cultural editor of one of Europe's most influential newspapers, Le Monde, in Paris. Her biography of renowned French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, Marguerite Yourcenar: l'invention d'une vie, was published by Gallimard in 1990, and in English translation by the Chicago University Press in 1993. Josyane Savigneau's book on the life of Carson McCullers, Carson McCullers: un coeur de jeune fille, was published by Stock in 1995, and will be published in English translation by Houghton Mifflin in 2000.

Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of the novels The South (shortlisted for the Whitbread first novel award), The Heather Blazing (Winner of the Encore Award in 1993) and The Story of the Night (Winner of the Ferro-Grumley Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1998). He has also written the non-fiction books Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, and with Carmen Callil The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. He lives in Dublin. His latest work, The Blackwater Lightship, was been shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize.

Allen Weinstein
Non-voting Chairman of the Judging Panel, Professor Allen Weinstein is an American historian with a distinguished teaching career in the United States. He has received a number of awards in recognition of his work as an historian and his efforts on behalf of global democratic development, most significantly the United Nations Peace Medal. He is President and CEO of the Center for Democracy (Washington, D.C.) and has served as non-voting chairman of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award since its inception in 1995.

Wide Open is word perfect, witty and ironic. Its dialogue sparkles and its chiselled sentences display both a razor-sharp comic sensibility and flawless structure.
In Wide Open, Nicola Barker has created a set of characters at once absurd yet deeply representative of human nature today. The book advances the already rich tradition of the grotesque and goes beyond magical realism in English literature, taking these to new, risky and unexpected heights.
Barker's novel portrays a cast of characters wounded by life and socially marginalised, who come together on the Isle of Sheppey to learn whatever lessons they are capable of learning. In the end, the entire group intersects in a climax marked by clarity and insight.
The overriding triumph of Wide Open is its stunning manipulation of language to create original and credible images of its bizarre protagonists. Nicola Barker's characters are relentlessly strange: all rough surfaces and open wounds, fresh tics and old idiosyncracies - all within an engagingly free-wheeling narrative.
The author's focus on marginal lives and on the importance of the dispossessed 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.