Irish award might help you choose a good read for 2012

With a prize of €100,000, the International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award is the world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English. The Award is a result of a partnership between Dublin City Council and IMPAC, a company which operates in over 50 countries and is administered by Dublin City Public Libraries.

The unique thing about this award is that the nominations are made by libraries in capital and major cities all over the world, each participating library being able to make 3 nominations on the basis of ‘high literary merit’ as determined by the nominating library.

Our own State Library of NSW is one of the participants.

The longlist was announced yesterday and if you click here you can read the full long list and also read a plot summary of each one. A judging panel then comes to a shortlist of 10 titles (due in April 2012) before the winner is announced in June 2012.

This year the 147 eligible nominated novels have come from 122 cities and 45 countries worldwide. Thirty-four of the nomintated titles have been translated into English from 18 different languages. Thirty-one of the nominated titles are first novels.

Australian nominees are Roger McDonald for When Colts Ran, Kim Scott for That Deadman Dance and Chris Womersley for Bereft.

Longlist for World’s Richest Literary Prize announced

The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, with its prize of €100,000, is the world’s richest literary prize. The award, established in 1994 and awarded annually since 1996, is sponsored by Dublin Corporation and IMPAC, a productivity improvement company which operates in over 50 countries world-wide.

Last night the longlist for the 2011 Award was announced in Dublin. There are 162 eligible nominations come from 126 cities and 43 countries. 42 of the shortlisted titles are translations spanning 14 languages and 35 of them are first novels.

Aussie nominees include :

• Peter Carey – Parrot and Olivier in America
• Nick Cave – The Death of Bunny Munro
• JM Coetzee (we’re adopting him as our own) – Summertime**
• MJ Hyland (another adoptee, she was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin but she studied English and law at the University of Melbourne) – This is How
• David Malouf – Ransom**
• Alex Miller – Lovesong
• Kristina Olsson – The China Garden**
• Kalinda Ashton – The Danger Game

Those marked ** are the titles nominated by the State Library of New South Wales.

Nominations are made on the basis of “high literary merit” and come from over 100 public libraries worldwide; an unique international library cooperative project. Nominations are made by libraries in capital and major cities and each library can nominate up to three novels each year.

To be eligible for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award the novels need to have first been published in English between January 1st and December 31st 2009 (novels in translation can have been published between January 1st 2005 and December 31st 2009 and first published in English in 2009).

As stated above, this is the world’s richest literary prize with the winner gaining a trophy and €100,000 (or €75,000 to the author and €25,000 to the translator for a novel that has been translated).

The shortlist of a maximum of 10 titles, selected by an international panel of judges, will be announced April 12th 2011 then the winner on June 15th 2011.