East Midlnds Book Award - winner announced

Jon McGregor won the East Midlands Book Award 2013.

The £1000 cheque and trophy was presented by crime writer John Harvey as part of the Oakham Festival.

Jon’s book, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You, published by Bloomsbury, was the unanimous choice of the judges – John Harvey, Mel Read and Robert Gent.

After the awards ceremony Jon McGregor said: “I’m honoured to have won this year’s EMBA, not least because it was a shortlist of real strength and breadth. I’ve always felt supported by the community of writers in Nottingham and the East Midlands, so this prize is particularly welcome.”

This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You is set in the flat and threatened fenland landscape, where the sky is dominant and the sea lurks just beyond the horizon.

A man builds a tree house by a river, in anticipation of the coming flood. A sugar-beet crashes through a young woman’s windscreen. A boy sets fire to a barn. These aren’t the sort of things you imagine happening to someone like you. But sometimes they do.

Jon McGregor is the author of the critically acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, So Many Ways to Begin and Even the Dogs. He is the winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has been twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

The aim of the East Midlands Book Award is to raise the profile of published writers living in the East Midlands, writing on any theme, in any setting.

The full shortlist for this year's award comprised:

• Will Buckingham – The Descent of the Lyre, Roman
• John Gallas – Fresh Air, and The Story of Molecule, Carcanet
• Graham Joyce – Some Kind of Fairy Tale, Orion
• Jon McGregor – This Isn’t the Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like you, Bloomsbury
• Alison Moore – The Lighthouse, Salt
• Neil Roberts – A Lucid Dreamer, The Life of Peter Redgrove, Random House
• Jonathan Taylor – Entertaining Strangers, Salt

The Trustees have secured private funding to run the East Midlands Book Award for ten years. Nominations for books published this year are already open. To find out how to enter your book, visit www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk/awards.