#DUBLITAWARD
10 Canadian novels are among 160 titles that have been nominated by libraries worldwide for the €100,000 International DUBLIN Literary Award, the world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English. Nominations include 53 novels in translation with works by 44 American, 25 British, 10 Australian, 7 Irish, 6 German and 3 South African authors.
Organised by Dublin City Council, the 2016 Award was launched today [9th November] by The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Críona Ní Dhálaigh, Patron of the Award, who commented “the Award, now in its 21st year, has made a fantastic contribution to the literary life of Dublin and brings significant benefits to the City. It’s right that, as the Award is now entirely a City initiative, sponsored by the City Council, it should be called the International DUBLIN Literary Award”.
The Canadian titles are:
Sweetland by Michael Crummey
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Us Conductors by Sean Michaels
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O’Neill
Who by Fire by Fred Stenson
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Will Starling by Ian Weir
The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner
Outline by Rachel Cusk
The Back of the Turtle by Thomas King
Libraries in Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa, Saint John, St. John’s Sydney, Toronto and Winnipeg nominated books for the 2016 award.
Two Canadians have won the prize, the late Alistair MacLeod for No Great Mischief in 2002 and Rawi Hage for De Niro’s Game in 2008.
The 2016 Judging Panel includes Australian novelist, Meaghan Delahunt; Ian Sansom, British novelist, critic and academic; Irish writer, Carlo Gébler; Iglika Vassileva, Bulgarian translator and Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos. The non-voting Chairperson is Eugene R. Sullivan (USA).
The International DUBLIN Literary Award (formerly known as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) is managed by Dublin City Council’s library service. Margaret Hayes, Dublin City Librarian, announced that the 160 books eligible for the 2016 award were nominated by libraries in 118 cities and 44 countries worldwide; noting that 53 are titles in translation, spanning 19 languages and 49 are first novels.
The full list of 160 titles is available here.
Speaking of the global interest in the Award, the City Librarian remarked “reading groups worldwide each year anticipate the longlist and later the shortlist with excitement and interest. This anticipation will reach fever pitch when The Lord Mayor announces the twenty-first winner on 9th June 2016. From previous experience we know that the 21st winning title will be top of the library readers list for 2016 at home and abroad bringing readers together in an unparalleled international book club”.
Other novels nominated for the 2016 Award include A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize; All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and The Back of the Turtle by Thomas King, winner of the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Fiction.
Among the 53 translated authors are German author Jenny Erpenbeck, winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Javier Cercas (Spanish), Helle Helle (Danish), and Haruki Murakami (Japanese). For the second time, translated titles comprise one third of the longlist – 33%.
Two previous winners have also been nominated, 2006 winner Colm Tóibín and 2007 winner Per Petterson.
The book that received most nominations this year is Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See, chosen by 14 libraries in Canada, Germany, Greece, Ireland, The Netherlands and the USA.
The shortlist will be published on 12th April 2016 and the Lord Mayor will announce the winner on 9th June.