Several of Ireland's leading writers, including William Trevor, John Banville and playwright Sebastian Barry, are among the authors featured on the 125-book longlist nominated for next year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
The list, which was announced in Dublin yesterday, will be whittled down to a shortlist of between six and 10 novels, from which the eventual winner of the €100,00 prize will be chosen.
In addition to Trevor, nominated for his 2002 Booker runner-up The Story of Lucy Gault, John Banville's Shroud and Sebastian Barry's Annie Dunne, are The Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor and Michael Collins' much praised The Resurrectionists.
The Irish contingent of five writers is matched by five South American writers and seven Australian, while 29 writers from the US - including John Updike, Annie Proulx, Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster - and two dozen from Britain indicate the international market appeal of English-language fiction. That said, some 35 novels in translation have also been nominated.
Sharing the honours for the highest number of nominations is Italian writer Umberto Eco and US novelist Jeffrey Eugenides with his Pulitzer Prize-winning tragi- comic domestic epic Middlesex.
In hot pursuit with 10 nominations is the gifted Canadian-based Indian writer Rohinton Mistry, a three-time Booker runner-up and a previous IMPAC contender. Mistry's wonderful novel, Family Matters, must be considered a potential winner.
Among other challengers is the outstanding South African writer, first double Booker winner and this year's Nobel Literature Laureate, J.M. Coetzee, with Youth.
Two of the most prolific of US writers, Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike, have also been nominated. Oates, an often uneven, even frenetic writer, is represented by one of her best books, I'll Take You There. The ever popular Updike - a true stylist who, though well honoured in the US has won surprisingly few international literary prizes - has been nominated for a subtle, most impressive novel, Seek My Face.
Although the longlist invariably has a touch of all the usual suspects about it, this list is more literary than popular, albeit with a middlebrow emphasis.
Michel Faber's entertaining bestseller, The Crimson Petal and the White has been nominated, as has Michael Frayn's equally popular, Spies, Nicci French's Land of the Living, William Boyd's Any Human Heart, Isabel Allende's City of the Beasts, Donna Tartt's over-rated The Little Friend and former IMPAC winner Michel Houellebecq's Platform. A blatantly undeserving nomination is Zadie Smith's trite The Autograph Man.
