New York City author Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story has won the twelfth annual Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize honoring fiction written in the humorous spirit of the prize's namesake, British author P. G. Wodehouse. Judge Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival—at which the prize was announced—called the novel "great literature" and "wild comedy."
"Shteyngart's writing is thrilling," Florence told the Guardian. "He's a staggeringly clever satirist who manages to create worlds and people of perfect coherence and outrageous misfortune."
Shteyngart's prize is a double magnum of Bollinger champagne, a set of Wodehouse books, and a pig named after his book (the Gloucestershire Old Spot will join a herd that includes fellow swine with names such as Solar, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye).
The shortlisted titles this year were Serious Men (John Murray) by Manu Joseph, Comfort and Joy (Penguin) by India Knight, The Coincidence Engine (Bloomsbury) by Sam Leith, and The News Where You Are (Penguin) by Catherine O'Flynn.
Last summer's trailer for Super Sad is below, featuring Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Gaitskill, Edmund White, Jay McInerney, and Shteyngart's student, James Franco.