Irish writers among 146 nominations for prestigious €100k literary award

TWO Irish writers are among the 146 nominated for the world’s richest annual literary prize.

Novelists Joseph O’Connor and Anne Enright, who won the 2008 Booker Prize, are in the running for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, which is worth €100,000.

The nominations have come from 157 libraries in 41 countries worldwide.

Dublin City Council will announce the shortlist in April 2009 and the winning novel will be revealed two months later by the lord mayor.

Nominated books include The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Mr O’Connor was nominated for Redemption Falls by libraries in Cork and Limerick, while Ms Enright was nominated for her Booker winner The Gathering by libraries in Prague, Dublin, San Francisco, San Diego, Brazil and Frankfurt.

Dublin city librarian Deirdre Ellis-King said: “The books span 18 languages, 29 of which are translated from languages such as Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Slovenian and Hebrew. Nineteen of them are first novels.

“These are books that might not otherwise come to the attention of Irish readers. The spread of languages and the number of books in translation continues to grow”.

Afghan/American writer, Khaled Hosseini, is the most popular among the libraries with a total of 18 nominations for his novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

A five-member international panel of judges— including Co Laois novelist and UCD lecturer James Ryan — is chaired by former US judge and writer Eugene R Sullivan.