DUBLIN Shortlist: 2 April 2020 LITERARY Winner: 10 June 2020 AWARD 156 Books 21 Languages 119 Cities 6 Judges 40 Countries 1 Winner INTERNATIONAL 2020 Full details of the 2020 Longlisted Books inside! LOSE YOURSELF IN LITERARY DUBLIN 2 www.dublinliteraryaward.ie CITY LIBRARIAN’S FOREWORD CITY LIBRARIAN’S FOREWORD Welcome to the magazine of the International Dublin Literary Award 2020, where you can read about this year’s longlisted titles. Here you can browse the virtual shelves of the world’s libraries and choose what you would like to read, then pick your own favourites from among these 156 fantastic works of fiction. All of our 21 branch libraries in In June 2019 we welcomed Emily Dublin will have these books Ruskovich, author of Idaho, to the available and you may borrow them city of Dublin as our winner. You for free from your nearest library can read an extract of her winner’s and return them to the library most speech on page 4–5 and what convenient to your home or work. inspiring words she spoke in front It’s also easy to renew loans online, of a delighted audience that night without having to worry about in the Round Room of the Mansion Mairead Owens library fines. House! Thanks must go to our Lord Dublin City Librarian Mayor Paul McAuliffe for hosting In this magazine you’ll be introduced the Award presentation in such to our six judges, including new non- beautiful surroundings. voting Chair of the judging panel, Professor Chris Morash of Trinity In June 2020 Dublin City Council College Dublin. Every year we work will present the International Dublin hard to assemble an expert group of Literary Award to our 25th winner. In writers and translators to complete the same year, Dublin will celebrate the onerous task of reading our ten years as a UNESCO City of nominated titles in full, which they Literature, a designation applied spend months doing, and we are for by Dublin City Council in 2010 extremely happy with this year’s and which is run by the council’s judges, who will eventually choose a library service and is something for shortlist of up to ten titles and then the city to be incredibly proud of. a winner in June 2020. We go from strength to strength as a literary city and this award is at I would like to express my very the very heart of that growth. Enjoy sincere thanks to our previous reading and follow us on the journey non-voting Chair, The Hon. Eugene to the next winner! R Sullivan, who oversaw the award for the last sixteen years and who always gave so generously of his Mairead Owens time and expertise. I know it was a Dublin City Librarian great pleasure for the staff of Dublin City Council, and indeed the judging panels, to work with him every year and I wish him well in all his future plans. www.dublinliteraryaward.ie 3 “ ONE OF THE THE 2019 WINNER GREATEST HONOURS OF MY CAREER” American author Emily Ruskovich, winner of the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award for her debut novel, Idaho. It is very special to me that this is little green plastic card was a key to an award in which libraries across the greater world. It was a key that the world determine the longlist would take me not only far away through their nominations. Libraries from Idaho, but also, as it turns out, are places of kindness, existing for much, much deeper inside of it. the sole purpose of connecting us Though Idaho the novel holds at to each other and to ourselves. It its centre the most horrific tragedy is through a small library, in fact, a that I can imagine, its premise, to library in a prison in Idaho, that the me, is not tragedy but kindness – two main women of my novel first kindness given even when it’s not find each other through indirect deserved, kindness as the humblest means. It is through a library that form of salvation. Idaho is, to me, their lifelong silence is broken and more than anything, a love story. they take their first tentative step A woman marries herself to every into sisterhood. aspect of another person’s life – his I was five years old and could suffering, his passions, his disease; just barely write my name when I she marries herself to the tragedy received my first library card from a of his former family, but also to librarian named Sue in a very small the love that he once felt for them. Publisher of nominated edition: Chatto & Windus, UK town in the American west, a town And when he begins to lose his called Athol. That day left a strong memories, she must imagine those ISBN: 9780701189082 impression on me, because I think memories into herself, even as I understood even then that that painful as they are, to keep as a part 4 www.dublinliteraryaward.ie THE 2019 WINNER of her own heart what can no longer marries Jenny’s husband, I gave my be a part of his. And so she loves mother’s intense imagination, and my him by remembering; she loves him mother’s gentle face. And to Wade, by imagining. who suffers loss on so many levels, I gave my father’s strength, and his My novel is a love story in a broader eternally poetic heart. That is why I sense, too. I wrote it for my family love fiction – fiction allows us to give and for my husband; I wrote it to tell the best pieces of the people we love them how much I love them. This most to characters who are most may seem strange, considering that desperately in need of those pieces. the novel’s plot is about a family who is completely destroyed by I cannot express how grateful an act of horrific violence. But by I am to be the recipient of starting with a premise so painful, this award… I am especially with an action so unforgivable, I was honoured because of the forced to really search for what I admiration that I feel for the believed kindness was capable of other finalists. Seeing my surviving, and what we are capable name beside theirs when the of surviving because of it. shortlist was announced – that alone was one of the greatest To the woman who commits the honours of my career. horrific act at the centre of this novel, I have given my own mother’s painful Emily Ruskovich grace and humility. I wanted to love Winner of the 2019 Jenny, and did love her, even though International Dublin she has done the unthinkable, the Literary Award unforgivable – she murdered her own child. To Ann, the woman who later ‘Libraries are places of kindness, existing for the sole purpose of connecting us to each other and to ourselves’ 5 THE 2020 JUDGING PANEL 2018 JUDGING PANEL JUDGING 2018 THE 2020 JUDGING PANEL Zoë Strachan Zoë Strachan was born in Scotland and is the University of Iowa, the University of Otago, award-winning author of three novels: Ever UNESCO City of Literature writer-in-residence Fallen in Love, Spin Cycle and Negative Space. at the National Museum of Scotland and a As an editor, she has collected six new writing Robert Louis Stevenson Award. Two of her anthologies, and she also publishes short works for stage are Panic Patterns (with stories, essays and criticism. She teaches Louise Welsh) and an opera adaptation Creative Writing at University of Glasgow and of The Lady from the Sea (music by Craig has a PhD in Scottish Literature. Fellowships Armstrong) for the Edinburgh International include the International Writing Program of Festival, where it won a Herald Angel Award. Niall MacMonagle Niall MacMonagle was born in Killarney Independent and broadcasts frequently on and studied at UCC where he wrote an MA RTE Radio 1. He founded Poetry Aloud, has thesis on Virginia Woolf. He taught English done many public author interviews and has for thirty-five years, first at Bandon Grammar served on the boards of the National Library School and then at Wesley College, Dublin. He and the Seamus Heaney Foundation. In 2017, has edited several anthologies and textbooks he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of including the Lifelines series, Poetry Now Letters by UCD for services to literature. and Windharp Poems of Ireland since 1916. He writes a weekly art column in the Sunday Cathy Rentzenbrink Cathy Rentzenbrink was born in Cornwall, The Comfort and Joy of Books and will be grew up in Yorkshire, lived in London for published in September 2020. Cathy presents twenty years, and has now moved back to The Bookseller podcast, writes a column for Cornwall. She is the author of The Last Act Prospect, reviews books for The Times, and of Love, which was a Sunday Times top ten speaks and writes regularly on life, death, love bestseller of the year and was shortlisted for and literature. She is often to be found doing the Wellcome Prize and the Portico Prize. She events in bookshops and libraries, at festivals, followed this with A Manual for Heartache and in prisons. and her next book is called Dear Reader: 6 www.dublinliteraryaward.ie THE 2020 JUDGING PANEL Yannick Garcia Yannick Garcia is a Catalan writer and Spanish, Italian or Galician. He has also translator based in Barcelona. He has translated dozens of books from English and published poetry, for which he won the French into Catalan and Spanish by authors Gabriel Ferrater Prize, as well as short such as George Saunders, Lydia Davis, story collections, such as Barbamecs and Sherman Alexie, David Vann, Sebastian Barry, La nostra vida vertical which was awarded Joseph O’Connor, Carson McCullers and the Documenta Prize.