Norway's Petterson bags 100,000 euro book prize

DUBLIN, June 14 (Reuters) Norwegian author Per Petterson and his translator Anne Born won the world's richest literary prize for a single work of fiction in English today for the novel ''Out Stealing Horses''.

Petterson collected 100,000 euros (133,000 dollars), of which Born will get 25,0000, for his novel focusing on a solitary 67-year-old Norwegian widower whose chance encounter with a character from his youth triggers painful memories.

''It is a very happy man that stands before you. A surprised man,'' Petterson said after Dublin's Lord Mayor named him as winner of the 12th International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

''It seems with this book I am the boy with the golden trousers and every time I put my hand in my pockets I pick up a golden coin,'' he said. ''It is so cool.'' IMPAC described ''Out Stealing Horses'', which had already won the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, as ''a poignant and moving tale of a changing perspective on the world ... and of nostalgia for a simpler way of life.'' It fended off competition from 7 other books including ''Slow Man'' by South African Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee; ''Shalimar the Clown'' from Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie and ''A Long Long Way'' by Ireland's Sebastian Barry.

Two books from British authors had made the shortlist: ''Arthur and George'' by Julian Barnes and ''The Short Day Dying'' from Peter Hobbs. U.S. authors Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Safran Foer had also been in the last eight for their novels ''No Country For Old Men'' and ''Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close''.

The short-listed titles were selected from 138 novels that were nominated by 169 libraries from 49 countries and the winner chosen by a panel of five international judges.

''I felt the book took me back to my childhood,'' Lebanese novelist and judge Hanan al-Shaykh told Reuters.

''I thought it had everything: believing, the war, deceit, the unravelling of secrets by adults. If the translation is this good, the book in Norwegian must be a master piece.'' Belfast-born poet Gerald Dawe said it had been a strong short-list.

'''Out Stealing Horses' pipped past the post because it is such an extraordinarily artful book,'' he said following the award ceremony at Dublin's City Hall.

''It is a wonderfully subtle book. In the background, shadowing it with an almost ghostly narrative, there is the history of how war impacts on families in very different ways.'' REUTERS SV BD1757