Big Wellcome for Irish authors on prize longlist

Three Irish writers — Maggie O’Farrell, Bernard MacLaverty, and Mark O’Connell — have made the longlist of 12 authors for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize.

Authors from Britain, Ireland, the US, Nigeria, and Canada are in contention, alongside the first Swedish (Sigrid Rausing) and South Korean (Han Kang, winner of the Man Booker International award) authors to be longlisted for the £30,000 (€34,300) prize.

This year’s longlist features three novels about the different stages of love, life, birth, and death.