No more excuses, blocked novelists: A shrink convinced nervous London lawyer Joseph O'Neill to follow his novel-writing dream. Ten years on, he took the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Critics in England and parts of the U.S. Los Angeles were none too kind to O'Neill's 2008 novel Netherland. The work was shut out of the National Book Awards and National Book Critics Circle awards.

But the New Yorker loved the novel, about a family's downtown life in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack, and now O'Neill gets the $15,000 PEN prize. A movie deal and national cricket surge can't be far behind; buy your sets now, hipsters.