Books

Susanna Clarke, David Diop and four Irish authors on Dublin Literary Award longlist

Danielle McLaughlin, Sarah Crossan, Donal Ryan and Megan Nolan nominated for prize

Last year’s winner, New York-based Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, with judge Colm Tóibín.

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Martin Doyle
Mon Jan 31 2022 - 13:00

Four Irish authors and an Irish translator have been longlisted for this year’s Dublin Literary Award, along with the winners of last year’s International Booker Prize and Women’s Prize for Fiction, At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis, and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

If all politics is local, so too is literary taste, with three of the four Irish writers on the longlist nominated by their local county library. The Art of Falling by Danielle McLaughlin was nominated by Cork City Libraries; Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan, by Waterford City and County Libraries as well as Chicago Public Library; and Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan nominated by Limerick Libraries. Here is the Beehive by Sarah Crossan was nominated by Tartu Public Library in Estonia. Also longlisted is Cork-based author David Mitchell for Utopia Avenue.

Libraries from from 40 countries around the world nominated 79 novels, including 16 debuts, for the €100,000 prize, which is sponsored by Dublin City Council. Now in its 27th year, it is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English.

Nominations include 30 novels in translation, spanning 19 languages. If the winning book has been translated, the author receives €75,000 and the translator receives €25,000.

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Among the 30 translated books are novels originally published in Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil and Ukrainian. Translated authors include Rasha Adly (Egyptian); (Hoda Barakat (Lebanese); Andrey Kurkov (Ukrainian); Pilar Quintana (Colombian); Salma (Indian-Tamil); and Kim Soom (South Korean). Translators include Marilyn Booth, Frank Wynne (for The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens), Julia Sanches, Martin Aitken and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton.

Other titles among the 79 longliasted include Klara and the Sun by the Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro; Jack by Marilynne Robinson; In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova; Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri; Xstabeth by David Keenan; The New Wilderness by Diane Cook; The Other Black Girl Zakiya Dalila Harris; Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi; I is Another: Septology III-V by Jon Fosse; and The Survivors by Australian crime wrtier Jane Harper.

The shortlist will be unveiled on March 22nd and the winner will be announced by the patron of the award, Lord Mayor of Dublin, Alison Gilliland, on May 19th, as part of the opening day of International Literature Festival Dublin, which is also funded by Dublin City Council.

The Lord Mayor of Dublin commended the award for its promotion of excellence in world literature and the opportunity it provides to promote Irish writing internationally. “Our city with its rich literary heritage and thriving contemporary scene has created a bridge between world cultures through the Dublin Literary Award,” she said. “As someone who enjoys a great book, I can’t wait to be tempted by the longlist which will eventually, no doubt, reveal a hidden diamond.”

The international panel of judges who will select the shortlist and winner features Irish author Sinéad Moriarty; writer and translator Alvin Pang, from Singapore; Cork-born Clíona Ní Ríordáin, a professor of English at Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle; Prof Emmanuel Dandaura, a creative writer, critic and playwright based in Abuja, Nigeria; and Victoria White, a writer and journalist. The non-voting chairperson is Prof Chris Morash, the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin.

In order to be eligible for consideration for the 2022 award, a novel must have been first published in English between July 1st, 2020 and June 30th, 2021. If translated into English, it must also first have been published in a language other than English between July 1st, 2011 and June 30th, 2021 .

Eight new libraries have joined the network of international nominating libraries: Bibliothèque de Québec, Canada; Nanjing Library, China; Biblioteca Departamental Jorge Garcés Borrero and Biblioteca EPM, Columbia; Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt; Democritus University of Thrace, Greece; Fingal Libraries, Ireland; and the National Library of Nigeria, Nigeria.

Last year, the award was won by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli for Lost Children Archive. Belfast author Anna Burns won the year before for Milkman.

The full longlist is here.