€100k win for Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor has won the world's richest prize for a novel with his story about a group of homeless people.

Even the Dogs took the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth €100,000, last night 13th June, beating other nominated authors including Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love.

The tale of the shambolic lives of a group of drug and alcohol addicts, Even the Dogs "is an intimate exploration of life at the edges of society - littered with love, loss, despair, and a half-glimpse of redemption,” said the lord mayor and patron of the award, Andrew Montague.

Born in Bermuda, McGregor moved to London as a baby in the 1970s, and pursued poetry as a teenager before turning to short story-writing at university. In 2002, his novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was longlisted for the Man Booker when he was only in his mid-twenties.

The judges described Even the Dogs as a "fearless experiment", adding: The greatest compliment we can pay the novel is that we will go back to read it again – to relive it, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its men and women and to bear witness to their trials and sufferings.

Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor is published by Bloomsbury.