The Lord Mayor of Dublin has rolled out the longlist of titles being considered for the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The sum of nominations from libraries in forty-three countries, a total of 156 novels published in English in 2008 are up for the one-hundred-thousand-Euro award.
Among the nominees are Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison for A Mercy (Knopf); Marilynne Robinson for Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which won the Orange Prize last year; and Aleksandar Hemon for The Lazarus Project, a National Book Award finalist. Debut novelists also received nods, among them Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger (Free Press), winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, and Hannah Tinti for The Good Thief (Dial Press), winner of the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction's John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Husband and wife Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt each received a nomination, he for Man in the Dark (Henry Holt) and she for The Sorrows of an American (Henry Holt). The full longlist and information about each book is posted on the IMPAC Web site.
Selecting the winning book will be novelists Anne Fine, Anatoly Kudryavitsky, Abdourahman Waberi, and Zoë Wicomb, and scholar Eve Patten.
The shortlist will be announced by the Dublin City Council on April 14, 2010, and the winner on June 17. Previous recipients of the award, given since 1996, are Colm Tóibín, Per Petterson, Orhan Pamuk, and recent Nobel winner Herta Müller.