10 novels from Australia and 3 from New Zealand are among 150 titles nominated by libraries worldwide for the €100,000 International DUBLIN Literary Award, the world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English. Nominations include 48 novels in translation with works by authors from 40 countries in Africa, Europe, Asia, North America & Canada, South America and Australia & New Zealand.

Organised by Dublin City Council, the 2018 Award was launched today [6th November] by Lord Mayor/Ardmhéara Mícheál MacDonncha, Patron of the Award, who commended the Award for its promotion of excellence in world literature as well as for the opportunity to promote Irish writing internationally. ‘Dublin – a UNESCO City of Literature – is renowned throughout the world as a City of writers. There’s no doubt that our rich literary and cultural life makes Dublin a great destination for tourists, for students, and for overseas businesses. It also makes for a better quality of life for all of us who live and work in our capital. Is cathair litríochta í Baile Átha Cliath’ he said.

Libraries in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney inAustralia,  and libraries in Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and Timaru in New Zealand nominated books for the 2018 award.

Australian author David Malouf was the first winner of the award in 1996 for Remembering Babylon.

The New Zealand titles are:

The Wish Child – Catherine Chidgey
All Day at the Movies – Fiona Kidman
Billy Bird – Emma Neale

The complete list of Australian titles:

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos  –  Dominic Smith
The Sound –  Sarah Drummond
The Dry   – Jane Harper
Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms  – Anita Heiss
One   – Patrick Holland
Our Tiny, Useless Hearts  – Toni Jordan
The Good People   – Hannah Kent
An Isolated Incident  – Emily Maguire
The Museum of Modern Love   – Heather Rose
Vigil   – Angela Slatter

The 2018 Judging Panel comprises Xiaolu Guo, Chinese British novelist, essayist and filmaker; Nicky Harman, translator and co-Chair of the Translators Association; Courttia Newland, novelist and associate lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster; Mpalive Msiska, author and Reader in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and Vona Groarke, Irish poet and Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. The non-voting Chairperson is US Judge, Eugene R. Sullivan.The International DUBLIN Literary Award  is managed by Dublin City Council’s library service. Margaret Hayes, Dublin City Librarian, announced that the 150 books eligible for the 2018 award were nominated by libraries in 111 cities and 37 countries worldwide; noting that 48 are titles in translation, spanning 18 languages and 25 are first novels.

Speaking of the global interest in the Award, the City Librarian remarked “This great prize affirms Dublin’s commitment to international writers and translators, to literature and creativity. Through this award Dublin, a UNESCO City of Literature, brings the worldwide community of readers together to read the works of contemporary writers, writers who take their inspiration from themes local and universal, in settings real and imagined.”

Other novels nominated for the 2018 Award include Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, winner of the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Among the 48 translated books are novels originally published in Croatian, Czech, Finnish, Hebrew, Icelandic, Korean, Norwegian, Serbian and Slovene. Translated authors include Han Kang, Roy Jacobsen, Herman Koch, Robert Seethaler, Amos Oz and previous winners Javier Marías and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. For the first year, translated titles comprise almost exactly one third of the longlist – 32%!

The book that received most nominations this year is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, chosen by 15 libraries in Belgium, Estonia, Greece, Sweden and the USA.

All of the novels nominated for the Award are available for readers to borrow from Dublin’s public libraries. The full list of 150 titles is available on www.dublinliteraryaward.ie

The shortlist will be published in April 2018 and the Lord Mayor will announce the winner on 13th June 2018.

The International DUBLIN Literary Award is a Dublin City Council initiative.