30 years of the International Dublin Literary Award
Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the prestigious International Dublin Literary Award when the winner of the €100,000 award is announced in Dublin.
The award, which each year rewards a single work of international fiction, is sponsored by Dublin City Council.
Nominations for the prize come from public libraries all over the globe. This year 71 titles have been nominated by 83 libraries in 34 countries from as far afield as Australia, Canada, Korea and Argentina.
As Anne-Marie Kelly of Dublin City Library explains, "this award is different from other awards in that the libraries themselves have reader services teams that choose a book that is a favourite among their readers and they put forward a nomination based on what's the most popular or popularly read in their neck of the woods".
She adds: "It's absolutely different from a publisher nominating a title. Publishers would have various reasons pushing a debut novelist or a well-know novelist. But this is quite a pure award. It's actually validating a reader's choice, not only the excellence of the written work."
The 2025 award winner will be chosen from a diverse and international shortlist which includes two novels in translation, Not A River by Selva Almada and We Are Light by Gerda Blees.
Also on the shortlist is the 2023 Booker winner Prophet Song by Irish writer Paul Lynch, James by Percival Everett, The Adversary by Michael Crummey and North Woods by Daniel Mason.
The winner will be selected by a judging panel and announced in Dublin tomorrow.
Previous Irish winners include the highly acclaimed Colum McCann, who won the award in 2011 for Let the Great World Spin.
Reflecting on his win and the prize money of €100,000 he said: "It's a huge amount of money. Depending on your situation, it gives you a chance to kick back and spend a few years and write another book or to have some sort of financial security.
"The thing that I love about the award is that it's coming from all sorts of different directions. There's a real global sense that this is an important award. So, when I received both the nominations and the award itself, it just felt like an embrace from many different places."
Galway-based writer Mike McCormack won the award in 2018 for his novel Solar Bones.
"I know I was nominated by two libraries, one was Galway and the other was Nottingham, and that just thrills me. You think, how did they choose my book above hundreds of other books, because I have absolutely no links with Nottingham? I am forever indebted to them for that."
He retains a warm affection for the libraries of his childhood in Co Mayo and up to the present.
"I can remember the mobile library and reading cowboy books and then moving to Louisburgh and there was a small single room library in that town hall. That was just enormous. I did serious reading: Aldous Huxley, Heinrich Boll. All the writers that I discovered in that library."
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