Banville, Barry named on Impac longlist

Two novels by Irish authors have been named on the longlist of contenders for the €100,000 International Impac Dublin Literary Award.

Booker-winning masterpiece The Seaby John Banville and A Long Long Wayby Sebastian Barry are among 138 contenders for the 2007 award.

The Impac, which was initiated in 1994, is managed by Dublin City Libraries and is the world's largest literary prize for a single work of fiction. Colm Tóibín became the first Irish winner last year with his book The Master.

An international panel of judges will select the shortlist and eventual winner from the longlist.

Nominations were received from 169 library systems in 49 countries throughout the world. This year's nominations include works from 42 nationalities, 28 of whom are American, 21 British, seven Australian, seven South African and four from New Zealand. For the first time, nominations were received from Pakistan and Nepal.

Among the nominated works are novels translated from Albanian, Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Icelandic, Swedish, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and French.

Never Let Me Goby Kazuo Ishiguro is the libraries' favourite this year with 18 nominations, while Kafka on the Shoreby Haruki Murakami received 12 nominations.

Ishiguro won the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for his second novel, An Artist Of The Floating World, and the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third, The Remains Of The Day.

Never Let Me Gowas also named runner-up in the Booker Prize this year to The Sea.

"The award includes a wonderful mix of books that are familiar to us and books translated from other languages by authors who might otherwise never come to our attention" said Lord Mayor of Dublin Cllr Vincent Jackson at the announcement of the nominations today.