There’s still time to read these six novels which are shortlisted for the world’s most valuable literary award – impressively, four of them are translated works …
Celebrating 28 years, Dublin Literary Award is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English, worth €100,000 to the winner. If the book has been translated the author receives €75,000 and the translator receives €25,000. Distinctive among literary prizes, nominations are chosen by librarians and readers from a network of libraries around the world.
The 2023 Award winner will be chosen from a diverse and international shortlist which includes four novels in translation, from Croatian, French, Spanish, and German and authors who are American, Mexican, German, Croatian, and Canadian-Vietnamese.
The international panel of judges who have selected the shortlist and will select the winner, include Gabriel Gbadamosi who is an Irish and Nigerian poet, playwright and critic based in London; writer and translator Marie Hermet who teaches creative writing and translation at the Université Paris Cité; English writer Sarah Moss who is the author of eight novels and now teaches on the MA and MFA in creative writing at UCD; Doireann Ní Ghríofa who is a bilingual poet, essayist and translator from Co Clare; and Arunava Sinha who translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry from Bengali to English and from English to Bengali and has won several translation awards in India. The non-voting Chairperson is Professor Chris Morash, the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. The winner of the Dublin Literary Award will be announced on Thursday May 25 by the Lord Mayor Caroline Conroy. The shortlisted titles are:
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
This wide-ranging, ambitious and playful story weaves between Idaho in 2014, where the sadly realistic story of a troubled teenager with a gun in a small town library unfolds, Constantinople under siege in 1452, where an orphaned girl has to make her own way after the nuns who have raised her flee for their lives, and the spaceship Argos in ‘Mission Years’ 55-64. There are intermissions in 1970s London, 1950s Korea, present-day America. The settings may be kaleidoscopic but the characters are wholly engaging, teenagers negotiating similar questions across the centuries: what knowledge do we need for adult life, how can we survive, live well and be good in times of scarcity? Is it safer to fear or to hope? In his well crafted prose Doerr conjures landscapes, cityscapes: one dying eagle, one child inching up a stone tower, and also an army on the march, a mountainside in spring, a walled city defeated.
The Trees by Percival Everett
In The Trees, Percival Everett uses the genre of comic supernatural crime fiction for what readers eventually realise is a more serious purpose than we might first expect. All of the usual elements of the genre are here: a series of grisly crimes, a pair of wise-cracking detectives, and a mysterious old lady who lives on the edge of town. The town, in this case, is Money, Mississippi (or, more precisely, the nearby suburb of Small Change), where two horribly mutilated bodies have turned up – one white, one black. When the body of the deceased Black man disappears from the local morgue, only to reappear inexplicably at another murder scene, we may think that we are in familiar territory for horror fiction. It is not until we realise that the two dead white men are descendants of the men who lynched Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, that Everett’s more serious purpose starts to become apparent. Ultimately, The Trees emerges as a novel about the legacy of racially-inspired hate crimes in the United States, extending beyond African-Americans to Chinese-Americans and Native Americans.
Paradais by Ferdnanda Melchor
Polo works as an aide-gardener in Paradise, a luxury housing complex in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz. A 16-year-old dropout, Polo hates his job, but it’s still better than the prospect of going home to his mother. Drinking sessions with Franco, who lives in one of the overpriced homes, are his only available means of escape. Franco may be sex-obsessed and equally ugly but he can swipe real American whiskey from his grandparents, and Polo won’t miss a chance to get wasted. He’ll even facilitate Franco’s sick ploy to assault Senora Marian, an attractive mother-of-two who lives in one of the white villas. Fernanda Melchor adopts the point of view of the perpetrators, their compulsive desire for whatever they cannot have. From the first page we know, even when we’d rather not – where it’s all heading, but Melchor’s prose is so mesmerising that we dare you to let go of the book before its very end.
Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp
“Man shall not live by feet alone.” This funny, thoughtful, heartfelt portrayal of a community is observed through the unusual perspective of the chiropodist kneeling at its feet. Our narrator is a woman who finds her career as a writer faltering, and decides to switch profession, so she turns to a new role as chiropodist in Marzahn, Berlin, where she finds herself listening intently to her clients. In these ostensibly mundane moments of care and conversation, she discovers that they each reveal something of themselves, their disappointments, their loves, their vulnerabilities, their rages, their joys. As the novel progresses, we meet character after character as the narrator does, through their feet, and through this slow, deliberate culmination of vignettes, nimbly translated by Jo Heinrich, a greater portrait is achieved, that of how individuals are inevitably shaped by the ever-turning cogs of the machine of history.
Love Novel by Ivana Sajko
An actor at what seems to be a dead-end, a frustrated scholar and novelist, and their newly-arrived baby sear every page and every paragraph and every sentence of Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel, translated from the Croatian by Mima Simic. Sajko takes no prisoners in her uncompromising and unrelenting story of what goes on between the unnamed couple in a city where the ‘system’ can grind anyone into a state of despair and panic. It’s intense and imaginative and equates the couple’s mutual antipathy with sociopolitical commentary on failed capitalism in a failed state to the inevitability of failed marriage.
Em by Kim Thúy
Em is a novel about love and war by Kim Thúy, a Vietnamese refugee writer in French-speaking Canada. It is an attempt to salvage something human from what the Vietnamese called the American war. And it is possible to read the book in several ways. As a novel, it reads like a personal essay, its writing precise and its stories provisional as it pieces together fragments of human lives lost on all sides of the conflict. On the other hand, it reads like an epic odyssey through the storms of war in less than 150 pages. The reader is introduced to the war’s impact through stories of interlinked characters, clinging together through instinct, each in their own circle of hell.