Belgian Paul Verhaeghen, who won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel Omega Minor, has decided to donate his prize money to the ACLU. Normally the prize is split between author and translator, but having translated his own novel into English from the original Dutch, he won the entire prize.

An excerpt from his acceptance statement (which can be found in its entirety on his blog Babylon Blues:

…to avoid supporting the regime with more tax dollars than I already owe them, I have asked the Arts Council England to donate the money associated with the Prize, all 10,000 pounds of it, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink - its cost is currently 3,810 dollar per second - but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it.

We are not immune to history. But neither is history immune to us.

Thanks to Marian Schwartz for passing along this amazing news, which she found on E.J. Van Lanen’s Three Percent.