The International Dublin Literary Award is a unique prize, presented each year by the Dublin City Council for a novel written in English or translated into English. The award is now in its 25th year. Since its establishment the Award has been granted to authors from all around the world publishing their work in various languages.
The books nominated for the award are chosen by the public libraries from major cities across the world. 156 novels from 40 different countries have been submitted for this year’s Award. Thanks to the Municipal Public Library in Wrocław, which participated in the nomination process, among titles on the shortlist we can find Olga Tokarczuk’s novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018.
The winner of the 2020 Dublin Literary Award will be announced on Thursday 22 October at 11am during a live broadcast. In order to watch the event online you have to sign up via organizer’s website.
The full list of nominated books this year comprised of 156 titles, from which 10 titles were selected for the shortlist. The 2020 shortlist nominees are:
- Pat Barker “The Silence of the Girls”
- Anna Burns “Milkman”
- Négar Djavadi “Disoriental”
- Esi Edugyan “Washington Black”
- Tayari Jones “An American Marriage”
- Édouard Louis “History of Violence”
- Sigrid Nunez “The Friend”
- Tommy Orange “There There”
- Anuradha Roy “All the Lives We Never Lived”
- Olga Tokarczuk “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead”
The author of the winning book is awarded €100,000. However, if the winning book is in English translation, €75,000 is awarded to the author and €25,000 to the translator. The International Dublin Literary Award is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English.
Because the main purpose of the award is to promote excellence in world literature all of the nominated books are available in Dublin libraries as well as in other library collections in Ireland. Titles that have been translated into Polish can be borrowed in library branches of the Municipal Public Library in Wrocław. Visit us and enjoy a good book!
Magda Nawrocka, Branch No 5