IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nominations unveiled

1.00pm - By CIAR BYRNE

Booker Prize winners are pitted against the best-selling author Dan Brown in the long list for the world's richest book prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, which scooped the Booker prize in 2003 has made it onto the list of almost 150 books nominated by libraries around the world for the prize, which is worth £70,000 ($184,000).

New Zealand nominations were Sky Dancer by Witi Ihimaera, The Scornful Moon by Maurice Gee, Iridescence by Peter Wells, Shot by Sarah Quigley and The Mango's Kiss by Albert Wendt.

Others on the list are novels by fellow Booker winners Margaret Atwood, Anita Brookner, JM Coetzee, Graham Swift and Peter Carey. English author Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time gained the most nominations, while Monica Ali's Brick Lane was the third most popular book on the list.

Brown's international best-seller The Da Vinci Code is also in the running for the euro 100,000 honour ($189,000) - the biggest sum of money awarded for a single novel, and the second largest literary award in the world after the Nobel Prize for Literature, which recognises lifetime achievement rather than a single work.

Other best-selling authors on the long list include Robert Harris for his historical thriller Pompeii and Chocolat author Joanne Harris for her novel Holy Fools.

The nominations for the Impac Awards 2005 come from 185 library systems in 51 countries around the world.

To qualify, a book must have been published in English, although the original version can be in any language. In a mark of the prize's international nature, 29 of the novels on the long list are translated from 15 non-English languages including Afrikaans, Croatian, Finnish, French, Icelandic, Serbian, Spanish and Swedish.

The nominations cover works from 45 nationalities, including 43 American writers, 26 British, nine Canadians, nine South Americans, five New Zealanders and three Irish authors.

The award was set up in 1995 by the then Lord Mayor of Dublin to build on the Irish capital's literary heritage and is run by Dublin City Public Libraries.

Five out of the nine winners to date have been novels in translation, including last year's winner the Moroccan born writer Tahar Ben-Jalloun's book The Blinding Absence of Light and the controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq who won the award for his work Atomised in 2002.

But this international aspect also has its downside - the Impac Awards has not yet achieved the same level of recognition as some of the major national book prizes.

"It hasn't established itself in the same way as the Booker and the Whitbread in the UK, the National Book Awards in the US and the Prix Goncourt in France," said Joel Rickett, the deputy editor of The Bookseller.

"That is partly because of the international nature of the prize. No one country's media seems to have got behind it, so no one country owns it and it hasn't managed to attract the glittering international prestige of the Nobel prize."

Another problem is the long lead up to the prize -- because the nominations come from libraries rather than publishers, the books on the long list for the 2005 award were published in English in 2003.

The Impac Awards shortlist drawn up by an international panel of judges will be announced on 8 March 2005.

2005 longlist

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