One of Ireland's leading playwrights, Sebastian Barry, is the only Irish writer to feature on the 2007 International Impac Dublin Literary Award shortlist.
The titles of the eight competing novels, all of which will have been widely read in Ireland, were announced yesterday at the Mansion House in Dublin. Included are two former Booker prize winners, one of whom, South African J M Coetzee was the first writer to twice win the Booker prize and was the 2003 Nobel Literature laureate.
His entry is Slow Man and he is internationally acknowledged as one of the world's finest writers. Also included is Bombay-born Salman Rushdie's characteristically burlesque extravaganza Shalimar the Clown, a crazed romance with an underlying theme of terrorism.
Two British writers, Julian Barnes and Peter Hobbs are shortlisted. Barnes's Arthur & George, was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker prize. Based on the life of Arthur Conan Doyle and a specific miscarriage of justice, this engaging and surprising narrative set in Edwardian England was well received on publication and praised for its warmth and humanity - qualities not previously associated with Barnes's clever fiction.
The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread first-novel award and is a beautiful, rather spiritual book about the life of a young 19th-century blacksmith.
Sebastian Barry's first World War adventure, A Long Long Way, was also shortlisted for the 2005 Booker prize.
In it, young Willie Dunne goes to fight in the Great War, while back home the Easter Rising is being played out. Ironically, the 2005 Booker prize winner John Banville who was nominated on the Impac longlist, failed to make this final eight.
US fiction is represented by two contrasting authors. One is Cormac McCarthy's ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, a violent melodramatic thriller in which the anti-hero is tracked relentlessly by a hired killer. This is very different from Jonathan Safran Foer's hyped post-9/11 quasi comedy, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; one of those books you either love or hate. It is gimmicky, not particularly convincing and Safran Foer relies heavily on different type faces and photographs.
The only novel in translation to be included this year is Norwegian Per Petterson's delightful and evocative Out Stealing Horses with its echoes of the great William Maxwell. Trond the narrator, now elderly, has returned to a place he knew as a boy. He recalls the summer when he was 15.
This is a beautiful, accomplished work which featured in my 2006 book of the year list and will now win additional readers as will Hobbs's elegiac period piece, The Short Day Dying.
The Impac award is worth €100,000 and is the world's largest literary prize for a single work of fiction. Nominations are submitted by library systems in major cities throughout the world. Last year Colm Tóibín was the first Irish winner for The Master.
This year's winner will be announced on June 14th.
Aside from showcasing international fiction, the award has, since its inception in 1995, alerted readers to unknown quality foreign fiction.
While McCarthy and Rushdie have their admirers, Coetzee's Slow Man, in which the central character sets out to learn to live before it is too late, is the best book and should win.
THE SHORT DAY DYINGby Peter Hobbs (Faber and Faber)
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MENby Cormac McCarthy (Picador, Vintage International)
OUT STEALING HORSES by Per Petterson (Vintage)
SHALIMAR THE CLOWNby Salman Rushdie (Random House)
A LONG LONG WAY by Sebastian Barry (Faber and Faber, Viking Penguin)
ARTHUR & GEORGEby Julian Barnes (Vintage)
SLOW MANby JM Coetzee (Vintage, Viking Penguin)
EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE by Jonathan Safran Foer (Penguin, Houghton Mifflin)
