One Irish book makes shortlist for €100,000 Dublin Literary Award
The Dublin Literary Award is the world's most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction in English.
The Dublin Literary Award, which is sponsored by the capital's city council and managed by Dublin City Libraries, is worth €100,000 and is the world's most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English. Nominations are made by librarians and readers from a network of libraries around the world.
The international judging panel will select one winner, which will be announced on May 20 as part of the International Literature Festival, Dublin. The shortlist for a prize formerly known as the Impac includes Apeirogon by Irish author Colum McCann, one of four Irish novels which was long-listed — the others on the longlist were When All is Said, by Anne Griffin, Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor and The Trumpet Shall Sound, by Eibhear Walshe.
She may (controversially) have had to share the spoils with Margaret Atwood, but Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize win deservedly brought the author’s work to a whole new audience. In her previous books, Evaristo, who is of British and Nigerian heritage, and a professor of creative writing at Brunel University in London, has explored the African diaspora experience. In Girl, Woman, Other, she hits the sweet spot between literary accomplishment and sheer reading pleasure in a compelling collection of narratives by 12 women whose lives are interconnected to varying degrees across time and place.
Evaristo captures the immigrant experience through the generations while also casting an often sly and humorous eye over family, friendship, feminism, and sexuality. There are echoes too of Evaristo’s own experience as a co-founder of a theatre company in the character of Amma, whose story anchors the book. Joyous, uplifting, and entertaining, it is the perfect read for our times and surely a strong contender for another top prize here.
The immigrant experience is also explored in this debut novel by Vuong, a 33-year-old Vietnamese-American previously known for his award-winning poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. In this book, Vuong explores generational trauma and the legacy of war through the eyes of Little Dog, who recalls his formative years in a letter to his Vietnamese mother.
The epistolary framing structure is belied, however, by the fragmented, elliptical language, which brims with poetic flourishes, giving the narrative a dreamy quality. Little Dog grows up in Hartford, Connecticut, a place, which while offering a certain escape from the poverty and hardship suffered by his family in Vietnam, brings other harsh psychological and emotional deprivations to bear. Vuong blends the poetic and the political, tackling issues such as domestic violence, exploitation of immigrant labour and the opioid epidemic. Where the book really shines, however, is in Vuong’s raw yet tender depiction of his awakening sexuality and relationship with the troubled Trevor.
Another work which explores the heart-wrenching cost of conflict, and Ireland’s only entry on the shortlist. McCann turns his immense literary talents to the seemingly intractable Palestine-Israel conflict, taking inspiration from the real-life friendship of two men who bond through tragedy.
Rami is Israeli and his 13-year-old daughter Smadar is killed by a suicide bomber while out shopping with her friends; Palestinian Bassam’s ten-year-old daughter Abir is shot dead by an Israeli soldier outside her school. From this painful premise comes a breathtakingly imaginative and ultimately uplifting story of hope, forgiveness and the redemption of friendship that will linger long after reading. Dubliner McCann won this award in 2011 in its previous incarnation as the Impac prize, for Let the Great World Spin. Greater in scope and ambition than that acclaimed novel, Apeirogon would be a worthy, and popular, winner for the ‘home' audience.
Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad, cemented his reputation as one of the greatest living American writers winning his second Pulitzer Prize with this novel. Whitehead tells the story of diligent student Elwood Curtis, whose life, with an almost painful inevitability, veers off course when he is wrongly implicated in a crime and sent to a brutal segregated reform school in Florida in the 1960s.
The book opens with an eerie echo of Ireland’s own painful history, as an unmarked graveyard dug up by developers reveals horrific evidence of abuse that has lain buried for decades — an occurrence based on a real-life institution, the Arthur G Dozier school for boys. In this powerful and propulsive novel, Whitehead once again excavates past brutalities with skill and empathy, demonstrating how we can all be bystanders to the banality of evil, and inviting the reader to ask why such racial injustice still pertains.
This voyage into the violent and sexually depraved reality of life in a lawless Mexican village is not for the faint-hearted. While framed by that most traditional of genres, a murder mystery, its format is anything but, as the stream-of-consciousness narrative unfolds over just eight paragraphs.
When the body of ‘The Witch’, a local woman shrouded in superstition, is discovered, it sets off a chain of events through which Melchor focuses attention on the systemic murder of hundreds of girls and women each year; the author is from Veracruz state which has the highest rate of femicide in Mexico. While Melchor peers into the darkest recesses of humanity, she still fosters empathy for those caught up in the relentless cycle of poverty and drug-related crime, victims and perpetrators alike. Hughes’ translation of this virtuosic work is an achievement in itself, and readers who persevere will be rewarded.
Another formally experimental read from a Mexico-born author —indicative of an increasingly influential cohort of writers — this book is rooted in Luiselli’s volunteer work as a court interpreter for children applying for asylum in the US. It follows a couple, both audio documentary makers, who undertake a fraught road trip from New York to Arizona with their children. When the boy and girl go missing along the way, their story coalesces with that of the countless undocumented children who have died or gone missing while crossing the border.
Luiselli’s third novel, her first written in English, is a fresh and original take on the ongoing plight of child refugees that avoids dehumanising them. The trope isn’t a new one, but Luiselli’s sophisticated treatment and use of photos and documents as a narrative device draws the reader along on the quest.
- dublinliteraryaward.ie
- Colm Tóibín, 2006, The Master
- Colum McCann, 2011, Let the Great World Spin
- Kevin Barry, 2013, City of Bohane
- Mike McCormack, 2018, Solar Bones
- Anna Burns, 2020, Milkman
