Source : Times of India
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year, won the prestigious Dublin International Literary Award.
The International Dublin Literary Award is one of the richest literary prizes in the world. The winning author is awarded €100,000, however, if the winning book is a translation, the prize is divided between 75%-25% between the writer and the translator. The prize is only for novels in English (or translated into English) and it aims “to promote excellence in world literature. ”
This year, Solar Bones won the prize from amongst 150 titles. It’s about All Souls’ Day, a day in Ireland where the dead may return, and Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, who comes back to his kitchen on this magical day. It was Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year.
The book was nominated by Galway Libraries and by Nottingham Libraries, who called it, “A readable, experimental novel set in and described as a hymn to small-town Ireland.”
The judging panel for the award this year were Xiaolu Guo, Nicky Harman, Courttia Newland, Vona Groarke, and Mpalive Msiska. They described the novel as, “Formally ambitious, stylistically dauntless and linguistically spirited”.
