International Dublin Literary Award nominations

       The -- now IMPAC-less (they pulled their sponsorship) -- International Dublin Literary Award, the €100,000 prize which has "libraries in capital and major cities throughout the world" ("in 118 cities and 44 countries", this time around) nominate novels: "first published in English between 1st January 2014 and 31st December 2014" (and, if translated, "first published in a language other than English between 1st January 2010 and 31st December 2014"), has now announced the 160 nominated titles for the 2016 prize.
       Almost a third -- 53 titles -- are translations, from an impressive 19 languages. And yet the nominations also expose the weakness of the system: yes, there are translations from the Georgian (White Lama, by Merab Ratishvili; see the prize page) which you can't even find on Amazon.co.uk (and which was of course nominated by a Georgian library), and from the Malay (two, even -- both, unsurprisingly nominated by the National Library of Malaysia, but, hey at least The Michelangelo Code (seriously ? this is what they nominate ?) is available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk), and the Serbian (three, even -- but, of course, all nominated by the Serbian and Montenegrin nominating libraries ...).
       But translations from the Arabic ?
       None
       Translations from the Chinese ?
       None
       Translations from the Korean ?
       None
       Translations from the Japanese ?
       Hey ! One.
       Yes, unsurprisingly these languages are those of countries not well-represented among the nominating libraries (though there is a Chinese library -- which admirably did not go all ridiculously nationalist, as so many other libraries did, and chose not to nominate a Chinese title). Still, this has been a problem with the prize for many, many years and you would have thought they would have tried to do something about it by now.

       So the 160 titles are, as usual, a very , very mixed bag -- I'm shocked by some of the nominated titles, but there's certainly some decent stuff here, too. There are also some conspicuous absences, including titles by Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard.

       Twenty of the titles (and 17 of the 53 translations) are under review at the complete review:

• All Days Are Night, by Peter Stamm
• The Avenue of the Giants, by Marc Dugain
• The Children Act, by Ian McEwan
• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Murakami Haruki
• Christ's Entry into Brussels, by Dimitri Verhulst
• F, by Daniel Kehlmann
• The Giraffe's Neck, by Judith Schalansky
• I Called Him Necktie, by Milena Michiko Flašar
• In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman
• Kamal Jann, by Dominique Eddé
• The King, by Kader Abdolah
• 1914, by Jean Echenoz
• Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga
• Outlaws, by Javier Cercas
• Severina, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
• Summer House with Swimming Pool, by Herman Koch
• Tales of the Metric System, by Imraan Coovadia
• Talking to Ourselves, by Andrés Neuman
• The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair, by Joël Dicker
• Who is Martha ?, by Marjana Gaponenko

       Not many of these I'd really like to see take the prize, but it's good that deserving books that didn't get enough attention when they came out -- notably the Verhulst and the Echenoz -- might get a bit more notice, or that the Coovadia might now attract some US/UK publisher ....

       The shortlist -- "up to a maximum of ten titles" -- will be announced 12 April 2016, and the winner will be announced on 9 June.