Irish Writers Claire Keegan, Colm Toibin and Catherine Ryan Howard on long-list for 2023 Dublin Literary Award

Three Irish writers – Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín and Catherine Ryan Howard – are among the authors who have had their novels long-listed by libraries around the world, for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award.

Sponsored by Dublin City Council and now in its 28th year, the award is the world's most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English. It is worth €100,000 to the winner. In all, seventy titles have been nominated, many of them books that have been translated into English. If the winning book has been translated, €75,000 goes to the writer and €25,000 to the translator. The books are nominated by 84 libraries from 31 countries, offering a real spread of cultures, countries and themes.

The three Irish writers and titles nominated for the 2023 Award are Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard and The Magician by Colm Tóibín, who was the subject of a major Hot Press interview recently. All three writers have to be considered in the running for the award, with Claire Keegan in particular among the favourites, given the recognition her wonderfully spare, short novel has received to date. One of Hot Press’ Books of the Year, it has already won the Orwell Prize (2022) and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize – though that was won by Colm Toibin's The Magician. The plot, as they say, thickens!

Claire Keegan's earlier work Foster (2010) recently inspired the Irish language film An Cailín Ciúin, which has been nominated for an Oscar in the Best International Feature Film category.

Still from An Cailín Ciúin.

The shortlist of writers for the 2023 Award will be announced on March 28, with the winner unveiled on May 25.

Among the best-known international writers nominated are the multi-award winning Lauren Groff (Matrix), Jonathan Franzen (Crossroads), Monica Ali (Love Marriage), Karl Ove Knausgaard (The Morning Star) and Douglas Stuart (Young Mungo). Hot Press is particularly taken with the shortlisting of Bad Girls, the debut of the Argentine trans actor and author Camila Sosa Villada, who has written with great purpose about the meaning of having been a boy and knowing that she would ultimately identify as a woman and don a dress and high heels; and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, an uplifting story of American life, seen through the front windscreen of a car that takes the scenic route – only for the protagonists to discover that tragedy is impossible to escape.

The full list of seventy books and writers can be viewed here.

From the home of literature, the Dublin Literary Award is proudly sponsored by Dublin City Council & administered by Dublin City Libraries.

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