We’ve talked a lot (ad nauseum?) about book awards lately, dear readers–about who gets to choose them, who gets to select them, and what each prize means. And while I’m sure we all have our own favorite awards–meaning those prizes that help us find the best new books to read–I have one that any library patron can be excited about.
The International Dublin Literary Award is funded entirely by the City of Dublin, Ireland, and is awarded each year for a novel written in English or translated into English. At €100,000, the award is one of the richest literary prizes in the world. If the winning book is a translation (as it has been 8 times), the prize is divided between the writer and the translator, with the writer receiving €75,000 and the translator €25,000 (because, as we’ve discussed, we all owe our translators a great deal more than we can ever pay them).
But you know what the best part of the prize is (from a Behind The Desk Perspective)? The books are nominated by Libraries from around the world! Every year, some 400 ballots are sent out to libraries around the globe (you can see the full list of this years participants here), and the top 10 books make the longlist, which is announced in November, or there abouts. The shortlist has just recently been announced, with the prize being awarded in June. The International Dublin Literary Award has been dubbed “the most eclectic and unpredictable of the literary world’s annual gongs”, because of the diversity of its nominators and their reading habits–but this also makes for quite an adventurous reading list for us to sample!
Perhaps one day soon we’ll have a hand in nominating books for this award, but for now, how about we warm up with the short list for this years prize:
A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa
(Translated from the original Portuguese by Daniel Hahn)
Confessions of the Lioness by Mia Couto
(Translated from the original Portuguese by David Brookshaw)
The Green Road by Anne Enright
The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine
(Translated from the original Danish by Martin Aitken)
The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
(Translated from the original Spanish by Christina MacSweeney)
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk
(Translated from the original Turkish by Ekin Oklap)
A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler
(Translated from the original German by Charlotte Collins)
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara