Six novels have been shortlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award, with the winner due to be announced this afternoon.
he highly prestigious award is celebrating its 27th year. It 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.
For many, the attraction of the award lies in the fact that the shortlisted books are nominated by libraries in major cities across the world, making it a readers’ accolade.
The 2022 award winner will be chosen from a diverse and international shortlist which includes two translated novels and a first-time novelist.
The shortlist features authors who are French, Irish, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg (Alderville First Nation, Canadian), New Zealander and Nigerian.
The 27th winner will be announced at a special ceremony in Merrion Square Park at 1pm today.
Here are the 2022 nominees:
Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey. Credit: Dublinliteraryaward.ie
New Zealander Catherine Chidgey opens a new chapter of Holocaust literature as she tells the story of Greta Hahn, who is the wife of a concentration camp manager and doesn’t know – then doesn’t want to know – what goes on behind the fence.
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop. Credit: Dublinliteraryaward.ie.
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At Night All Blood is Black is a carefully crafted, heart-wrenching, passionate and engaging story about the insanity of war and its devastating toll on humanity. Told from the perspective of Alfa Ndiaye, a 20-year-old Senegalese who, like his friend, Mademba Diop and many other young West Africans were conscripted by European imperial powers – in this case, France – to fight in World War I.
Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Credit: Dublinliteraryaward.ie.
The way Simpson writes is completely unique. The love and honour about which she writes among Anishinaabeg (an indigenous people in Canada) and the land is both poetic and lyrical. Narrators include Mashkawaji (they/them), who lies frozen in the ice, remembering a long-ago time of hopeless connection and now finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension.
The Art of Falling by Danielle McLaughlin. Credit: Dublinliteraryaward.ie.
Danielle McLaughlin’s novel is set in Cork. Its curator protagonist, Nessa McCormack, is organising a retrospective of the work of a Scottish-born sculptor, Robert Locke. Locke established himself in West Cork at the end of the 1960s, after years of wandering. Locke’s studio and his sculpture Venus at the Hotel Negresco, known colloquially as ‘The Chalk Sculpture’, will become a permanent exhibit in the museum where Nessa works.
The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter. Credit: Dublinliteraryaward.ie.
The Art of Losing follows three generations of an Algerian family from the 1950s to the present day – as they progressively lose, in the fog of conflict and post-colonial transition, their country, their roots, and their innocence. The narrative wings its way from the contested highlands of northern Algeria to a French refugee camp, to the streets of Paris and back, borne forward by a cast of nuanced characters: from the patriarch Ali to his granddaughter Naïma, heir to a new digital age in which old prejudices and presumptions persist. Each is profoundly human in their passions, grief, vanities, contradictions and silences.
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi. Credit: Dublinliteraryaward.ie.
From that first sentence, the reader is immersed in contemporary Nigeria in all of its complexity, where tight family and community bonds are woven into the submerged stories of gay, bisexual and transgender people, and where groups such as the ‘Nigerwives’ (foreign-born wives of Nigerian men) form one of the cultures that make up the mosaic of Nigerian society. Emezi’s novel manages to balance an unflinching realism with something of the quality of a folktale or a myth.
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