Impac shortlist boasts global scope

[Dave Monroe]

Impac shortlist boasts global scope
Guy Dammann
Wednesday April 2, 2008
guardian.co.uk

The shortlist for the world's largest literary award, the
International Impac Dublin prize, was announced today with a selection
of eight novels that further reinforce the prize's already strong
international credentials. With only two of the shortlisted novels -
Irish writer Patrick McCabe's psychological chiller, Winterwood, and
Australian Gail Jones's technophile rhapsody, Dreams of Speaking -
originating from the English-speaking world, the selection extends to
books from Spain, Sri Lanka, Israel, Russia and Algeria.

Apart from its genuine internationalism, the Impac prize, now in its
13th year, is also distinguished among book prizes for the size of the
purse - at €100,000 (£79,000), the Impac dwarfs most other literary
prizes - and for the length of its longlist, which is unique in being
based on nominations from lending libraries the world over. Once the
longlist has been compiled, however, the lengthy process of drawing up
the shortlist follows the more traditional model of a voting panel,
albeit a rigorously international one.

>From this year's longlist of 137 titles, drawn from nominations from
161 libraries in 121 cities, today's shortlist of just eight novels is
also remarkable for the absence of a number of strong contenders.
Neither last year's Booker winner, Kiran Desai, nor Thomas Pynchon
made the cut from a longlist which also included strong nominations
for Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, John Updike, Peter Carey and Cormac
McCarthy. Yesterday's Kiryama prize winner, Lloyd Jones, also failed
to make the shortlist.

[...]

The winner of this year's prize will be announced on June 12.

Last year's prize went to Norwegian Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses.

The shortlist in full

The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas (Spanish, in translation)
The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne (Sri Lankan)
De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage (Lebanese)
Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (Australian)
Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua (Israeli)
The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (Algerian) in translation
The Woman who Waited by Andrei Makine (Russian) in translation
Winterwood by Patrick McCabe (Irish)

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2270252,00.html

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

http://www.impacdublinaward.ie/