JK Rowling, writing under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, has been nominated for one of the world’s richest literary prizes, the €100,000 International Impac Dublin literary award.
Rowling, picked for her detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, is one of 19 British authors in the running for the 2015 prize, the most lucrative in the world for a single novel available in English. Novels are nominated by libraries around the world, with The Cuckoo’s Calling due to compete with some of the year’s most acclaimed fiction, including two Booker winners from the southern hemisphere – Australian Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and New Zealander Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries – and American literary heavyweight Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer prize-winning The Goldfinch.
Tartt was one of 37 Americans put forward by librarians for next year’s Impac, and was also the most-nominated writer, with The Goldfinch chosen by 19 libraries, in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand and the USA. The Cuckoo’s Calling was nominated by one library, in Nice, France, which described it as a “breathless novel with endearing and colourful characters with a touch of Agatha Christie”.
Rowling is joined in the British contingent by authors including Nathan Filer, picked for his Costa-winning novel The Shock of the Fall, Kate Atkinson’s acclaimed Life After Life, Jim Crace’s Booker-shortlisted Harvest and Jonathan Coe’s Expo 58. The huge, 142-strong line-up for the Impac is a rundown of some of world literature’s major names, including Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Stephen King and Neil Gaiman from the English-speaking world, and Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard, China’s Ma Jian, Spain’s Javier Marías, France’s Amélie Nothomb and Russia’s Mikhail Shishkin in translation. This year 49 novels in translation made the longlist.
The Impac is organised by Dublin City Public Libraries. Three British writers have taken the lucrative prize to date: Andrew Miller, for Ingenious Pain in 1999, Nicola Barker the year afterwards for Wide Open, and Jon McGregor for Even the Dogs in 2012. This year’s judging panel, which includes the authors Daniel Hahn, Kate Pullinger and Jordi Soler, will now consider the longlist, with the winner to be announced on 17 June next year.
The longlist in full:
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Free City by João Almino – translated from Portuguese by Rhett McNeil
Let the Games Begin by Niccolò Ammaniti – translated from Italian by Kylee Doust
As Flies to Whatless Boys by Robert Antoni
Kind of Kin by Rilla Askew
The Blind Man’s Garden by Nadeem Aslam
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood
This Place by Amitabha Bagchi
The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure
A Blind Goddess by James R Benn
Horses of God by Mahi Binebine – translated from French by Lulu Norman
Reply to a Letter from Helga by Bergsveinn Birgisson – translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton
Omunkashyu by Dilshan Boange
The Parrots by Filippo Bologna – translated from Italian by Howard Curtis
The Strangers’ Gallery by Paul Bowdring
The Herbalist by Niamh Boyce
The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
Mr Darwin’s Gardener by Kristina Carlson – translated from Finnish by Emily & Fleur Jeremiah
The Silence of the Wave by Gianrico Carofiglio – translated from Italian by Howard Curtis
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Return to Killybegs by Sorj Chalandon – translated from French by Ursula Meany Scott
Three Souls by Janie Chang
Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe
The Childhood of Jesus by JM Coetzee
The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto – translated from Portuguese by David Brookshaw
Harvest by Jim Crace
The Only Happy Ending for a Love Story is an Accident by JP Cuenca – translated from Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe
For Sure by France Daigle – translated from French by Robert Majzels
Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan – translated from French by George Miller
S by Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams
The Guts by Roddy Doyle
The Circle by Dave Eggers
The Things We Never Said by Susan Elliot Wright
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence
The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante – translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
On the Gold Coast by Evald Flisar – translated from Slovenian by Timothy Pogacar
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Back to Back by Julia Franck – translated from German by Anthea Bell
On Sal Mal Lane by Ru Freeman
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith
All Over Again by A-dZiko Simba Gegele
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Dark Heart of Florence by Michele Giuttari – translated from Italian by Howard Curtis and Isabelle Kaufeler
Roman Elegy by Sabine Gruber – translated from German by Peter Lewis
The Humans by Matt Haig
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
Benediction by Kent Haruf
Before I Burn by Gaute Heivoll – translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Cold Courage by Pekka Hiltunen – translated from Finnish by Owen F. Witesman
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
The Abyssinian Cache by Kurt J Jaeger – translated from German by the Author
No One Writes Back by Jang Eun-jin – translated from Korean by Jung Yewon
Saving Mozart by Raphaël Jerusalmy – translated from French by Howard Curtis
Perfect by Rachel Joyce
Under Budapest by Ailsa Kay
Fever by Mary Beth Keane
The Last Days of the National Costume by Anne Kennedy
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Wedding Speech by Khaliza Khalid
The Infinite Air by Fiona Kidman
The Bones of Paris by Laurie R King
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard – translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything by Daniela Krien – translated from German by Jamie Bulloch
K by Bernardo Kucinski – translated from Portuguese by Sue Branford
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Good House by Ann Leary
At Least We Can Apologizeby Lee Ki-ho – translated from Korean by Christopher Kykas
Tula – The Revolt by Jeroen Leinders – translated from Dutch by Brian Doyle
Naw Much of a Talker by Pedro Lenz – translated from (Swiss) German by Donal McLaughlin
Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa - translated from Portuguese by Allison Entrekin
Anatomy of a Girl Gang by Ashley Little
The Bookman’s Tale by Charlie Lovett
Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko
The Dark Road by Ma Jian – translated from Chinese by Flora Drew
Brief Loves That Live Forever by Andreï Makine - translated from French by Geoffrey Strachan
The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann
The Infatuations by Javier Marías – translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
Someone by Alice McDermott
The Pieces We Keep by Kristina McMorris
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
The Son by Philipp Meyer
Coal Creek by Alex Miller
Brittle Star Rod by Val Moore
The Rising of Bella Casey by Mary Morrissy
Stolen by Rebecca Muddiman
In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina – translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman
The Banner of the Passing Clouds by Anthea Nicholson
Life Form by Amélie Nothomb – translated from French by Alison Anderson
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Story of My Purity by Francesco Pacifico – translated from Italian by Stephen Twilley
The Collector of Lost Things by Jeremy Page
The Mussolini Canal by Antonio Pennacchi – translated from Italian by Judith Landry
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult
A Crack in the Wall by Claudia Piñeiro – translated from Spanish by Miranda France
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Love Letters of the Angels of Death by Jennifer Quist
The Victoria System by Éric Reinhardt – translated from French by Sam Taylor
Sparta by Roxana Robinson
In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge – translated from German by Anthea Bell
Paris by Edward Rutherfurd
The Thing About December by Donal Ryan
Orkney by Amy Sackville
Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin – translated from Russian by Andrew Bromfield
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Like It Happened Yesterday by Ravinder Singh
The Days of the Rainbow by Antonio Skármeta – translated from Spanish by Mery Botbol
The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson – translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton
Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone
Voices from Chernobyl by Ingrid Storholmen - translated from Norwegian by Marietta Maddrell
The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar
John Solomon and the Fifth Island by Samuill Tiew – translated from Malay by Zulhilmi Ghouse
The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol – translated from Czech by Alex Zucker
Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas
Plan D by Simon Urban – translated from German by Katy Derbyshire
Betrayal by Adriaan van Dis – translated from Dutch by Ina Rilke
Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos – translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
Let Him Go by Larry Watson
Eyrie by Tim Winton
Cairo by Chris Womersley
The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell
The Swan Book by Alexis Wright
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
Gloria by Kerry Young
Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra – translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell
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