Monday sees the announcement of the winner of this year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award at a ceremony in Dublin Castle. Among the eight contenders in a strong and diverse short-list is Don DeLillo's Underworld, which is already well on its way to becoming a modern classic; Bernhard Schlink's critical and best-selling success across Europe, The Reader, Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, Andrew Miller's elegant debut Ingenious Pain, about an 18th-century man determined to experience pain, and Jim Crace's 1997 Whitebread novel of the year and Booker runner-up Quarantine, an imaginative retelling of Jesus's time in the Judean desert, have all been prominent with the reading public.
Underworld would be a deserving, popular and indeed, obvious winner - it is a major achievement, and DeLillo is one of the world's leading novelists - yet his strongest challenge comes from the short-list's most exciting inclusion, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the innovative and original Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Should Murakami win, IMPAC will have alerted Western readers not only to the presence of a gifted comic writer, but also to a novel representative of the laconic surrealism which is so characteristic of contemporary Japanese fiction.
Now in its fourth year, the IMPAC prize, which was first won by the Australian novelist David Malouf for Remembering Babylon, is the world's richest literary prize, worth £100,000 to the winner - or, should the winner be in translation, as were Spaniard Javier Marias's The Heart So White and the Romanian writer Herta Muller's The Land of Green Plums - £75,000 of the prize money goes to the writer, with the remaining £25,000 going to the translator. This is an important innovation as it acknowledges the vast debt readers owe to translators, who break down the barriers of language with a skill which frequently reveals sensitivity and artistry.
Also of major importance is the fact that the prize is international - and is open to writers of all countries as long as an English translation of the book is available. The method of selection is also innovative; the short-list has been selected from a list of titles submitted by libraries in 41 countries.
Literary prizes invariably attract two responses; controversy or indifference. While the announcement of each year's Nobel Prize laureate for literature often leaves interested parties admitting they have never heard of the winner, the various US literary prizes such as the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, confined as they are to US writers, seldom receive much attention in Europe and the most prestigious French literary prize, Le Prix Goncourt, is usually referred to by way of an endorsement of merit when English language publishers are promoting an English translation of a French novel which has won it.
For all the criticism, particularly charges of middle-brow predictability, which have been annually levelled at the Booker McConnell for the past 30 years, it has promoted the reading of fiction. It has also highlighted - and in many cases, introduced - outstanding Indian, African and Caribbean writers as well as Australian, New Zealand and Canadians. It has often been said, if the Booker gets it wrong, then Britain's other major literary prize, the Whitbread - decided a couple of months later - often puts it right.
DeLillo, who won the inaugural Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize in 1989 for Libra, is joined on this year's IMPAC short-list by two compatriots, the distinguished critic and essayist Cynthia Ozick with The Puttermesser Papers, and Guatemalan-American Francisco Goldman, whose beautiful second novel The Ordinary Seaman, a magic realist Conradian story of life on a decaying ship, marks as dramatic a coming of age as this year's short-list is for the prize.
Ozick is the only woman short-listed. For all its clever shifts The Puttermesser Papers, a Walter Mitty-ish exploration of one woman's life, is the weakest contender and is overshadowed by the weight of history which Schlink's cold, predictable and unconvincing post-Holocaust romance The Reader evokes. On a wider level, it could be argued that as six of the short-listed writers come from two countries, the US and England, the national sweep is not as wide as might be expected. However, the three US writers represent three contrasting traditions, while the three short-listed English novels also point to three very different writers.
Both in scale and sweep, Underworld and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle dwarf the other contenders. DeLillo's epic, an elegy not a satire, is a spectacular lament for America, and particularly for its sense of self. Remembering the past rather than celebrating it, Underworld takes as its motif the journey of a baseball, one that was pitched in a legendary confrontation which took place in a famous ballpark, in the Polo Grounds in New York. A lethargic game suddenly comes to life with a shock home run which not only changes the result of the encounter, it - albeit mythically - alters Cold War history as DeLillo juxtaposes the famous October 3rd 1951 clash between the Giants and the Dodgers with the news that the Soviets have just tested their nuclear bomb.
"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful," begins a narrative which although possessing many brash, manic moments, often in the form of doomed comic Lenny Bruce's abrasive routines, or in a wonderful pastiche of the all-American Jell-O-consuming family circa 1957, is touching while avoiding sentiment. True, DeLillo's finest novel to date remains his mesmeric study of displacement The Names (1982), but at 827 pages, Under- world is stylish, possessing an awesome technique as well as moral grandeur and commitment to America, the subject which has long preoccupied DeLillo. It also balances big issues - national paranoia, consumerism, ethnic unrest and weaponry - against the minutiae of ordinary small lives.
Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is less global, but succeeds in telling Everyman's story through a series of bizarre events which befall Toru Okada, a 30-year-old man who has decided to forfeit his job in a law firm and stay at home while his wife pursues a career in magazine publishing. Initially, his days seem a tidy, if unexciting, ritual of domestic routine. But with the disappearance of the couple's cat, unease takes over. Okada the dreamer becomes the target of sex phone calls and becomes friendly with a strange teenage girl; his wife leaves him and he becomes involved with a pair of psychics.
His off-beat, increasingly eccentric narrative is delivered with deadpan reserve, and explains why he accepts visits from a pair of weird sisters and a quasi-sinister little man. Sex and torture preoccupy several of the characters, while there is also the burden of Japan's war-time history. Murakami sustains this dazzling, crazy, often hilarious odyssey through 600 pages without ever releasing his hold on the reader.
The eighth book on the short-list, Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, never quite regains the surreal beauty of its opening sequence in which a man dies in a ballooning accident. So: a magnificent DeLillo to be pushed to the tape by Murakami. Aside from the money, short-listing is as important as winning. Regardless of the winner, this year's IMPAC can't lose.
Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times journalist and critic.