16 Canadian books make longlist for €100K International DUBLIN Literary Award
Jane van Koeverden | CBC | Posted: November 6, 2017 9:18 PM | Last Updated: November 6, 2017
Sixteen Canadian books are among 150 titles nominated for the 2018 International DUBLIN Literary Award, an annual €100,000 ($149,260 Cdn) prize given to a work of fiction published in English.
Libraries around the world nominated books to create the longlist, which includes authors from 40 countries. Libraries in Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Saint John, St. John's, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg were among those that participated.
Madeleine Thien is on the longlist for Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a novel that follows two generations of a family living through Mao's Cultural Revolution, and later, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The book won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
Katherena Vermette is longlisted for her debut novel, The Break. Defended by Candy Palmater on Canada Reads 2017, the book unravels in the aftermath of a violent crime and is narrated by the residents of a Winnipeg neighbourhood.
Rachel Cusk's Transit is also on the longlist. Currently up for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Transit follows a writer in the midst of rebuilding her life after a divorce.
The other Canadian books on the longlist are:
- 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad
- The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
- The Island of Books by Dominique Fortier, translated by Rhonda Mullins
- This Marlowe by Michelle Butler Hallett
- The Parcel by Anosh Irani
- The Conjoined by Jen Sookfong Lee
- The Party Wall by Catherine Leroux, translated by Lazer Lederhendler
- Niagara Motel by Ashley Little
- Flannery by Lisa Moore
- By Gaslight by Steven Price
- Today I Learned It Was You by Edward Riche
- The Last Half of the Year by Paul Rowe
- All That Man Is by David Szalay
The shortlist will be published April 2018, with the winner announcement following on June 13, 2018. The jury includes Vona Groarke, Xiaolu Guo, Nicky Harman, Mpalive Msiska, Courttia Newland and Eugene R. Sullivan.
The 2017 winner was José Eduardo Agualusa for A General Theory of Oblivion, translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn.