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All the Lives We Never Lived shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award

All the Lives We Never Lived has been shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. 

 

 

The shortlist is drawn from a longlist of 156 novels submitted by library systems in 119 cities in 40 countries.

The statement from the judges said:

"Set in the 1930s, Anuradha Roy’s new novel is like an Indian raga that continues to resonate long after you have finished the last chapter. Myshkin is the nine year-old protagonist, and the central event in his life is revealed in the novel’s opening sentence: “I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman”. The Englishman turned out to be Walter, a German, who had to leave British India in a hurry, taking Myshkin’s beloved mother, with him, triggering a memorable saga of love, memory, kindness, human frailty and the devastating loneliness of a boy."

Listen here to brilliant actors reading from the shortlisted books

Excerpted below is a report by Martin Doyle in Irish Times

 

Nobel Prize, Women’s Prize, Giller Prize and US National Book Award winners shortlisted

Anna Burns, Olga Tokarczuk and Tayari Jones, winners respectively of the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, are among the 10 authors shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.

The €100,000 award, sponsored by Dublin City Council, is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English.

Eight of the shortlisted writers are women, including Canadian Giller Award winner Esi Edugyan for Washington Black and US National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez for The Friend, and three are novels in translation.

The shortlist

  • The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (British) Read our review
  • Milkman by Anna Burns (Irish) Read our review
  • Disoriental by Négar Djavadi (Iranian-French), translated by Tina Kover
  • Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Canadian) Read our review
  • An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (US) Read our review
  • History of Violence by Édouard Louis (French), translated by Lorin Stein Read our review
  • The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (US) Read our review
  • There There by Tommy Orange (Native American) Read our review
  • All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy (Indian) Read our review
  • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Polish), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Read our review

As well as Ireland, Poland, the US and Canada, the shortlist spans Britain, Iran and France. Of the shortlisted works not already garlanded with awards, perhaps the standout title is There There by Native American author Tommy Orange. The judges said of it: “the devastating history of genocide against Native American people rubs up against the everyday lives of this cast of contemporary ‘Urban Indians’ with astonishing effectiveness”.

 

Read an interview in Hindu here.

Read an article from the India Abroad News Service here


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