Atkinson, Filer and Rowling on IMPAC award longlist

Kate Atkinson, Nathan Filer and J K Rowling are among the 19 British authors competing for the €100,000 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

The longlist for the prize, now in its 20th year and given annually for a novel written in English or translated into English, features titles nominated by 39 libraries worldwide.

This year’s longlist of 142 books includes 19 by British authors, 37 American, nine Canadian, nine Australian and seven Italian authors.

Atkinson (pictured) is nominated for Life After Life (Doubleday) while Filer’s Costa Book of the Year 2013 winner The Shock of the Fall (The Borough Press) is also nominated.

Rowling makes the shortlist for The Cuckoo’s Calling (Sphere), her first novel written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Other British nominees are Matt Haig for The Humans (Canongate), Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave (Tinder Press) and Harvest by Jim Crace (Picador), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013.

Also making the longlist are The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus), winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize; The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Granta), winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize; and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Little, Brown), winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Goldfinch was the most popular book for the 2015 longlist, chosen by 19 libraries in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand and the USA.

Organised by Dublin City Public Libraries, the 2015 Award was launched today (24th November), by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Christy Burke, Patron of the Award, at a ceremony in The Dublin City Library & Archive.

The 2015 judges are Valentine Cunningham, professor of English language and literature at Oxford University; Daniel Hahn, translator, writer and editor, and chair of the Society of Authors; Kate Pullinger, winner of The Governor General’s Award for Fiction and professor of creative writing and digital media at Bath Spa University; Jordi Soler author of books of poems, story collections, and 10 novels translated into several languages and a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in Spain and México; and Irish novelist Christine Dwyer Hickey, winner of the Irish Novel of the Year 2012 for The Cold Eye of Heaven.

The shortlist will be announced on 19th April 2015, and winner of the award will be announced on 20th June.

There have been three British winners of the award - Andrew Miller in 1999 for Ingenious Pain, Nicola Barker in 2000 for Wide Open and Jon McGregor in 2012 for Even the Dogs.

The full longlist can be viewed online.

The 2014 award was won by The Sound of Things Falling by Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Bloomsbury), originally in Spanish and translated by Canadian Anne McLean.