On January 31, Dublin City Council announced the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award Longlist of Library. Two Hoopoe novels, A Recipe for Daphne by Nektaria Anastasiadou (2021) and The Girl with Braided Hair by Rasha Adly, and translated from the Arabic by Sarah Enany (2021), are among the seventy-nine books nominated by libraries around the world for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award. Now in its 27th year, this award is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English, worth €100,000 to the winner. If the winning book is a translation, the author receives €75,000 and the translator receives €25,000.
The DUBLIN Literary Award is presented annually for a novel written in English or translated into English. The Award promotes excellence in world literature and is solely sponsored by Dublin City Council, and administered by Dublin City Libraries. Nominations are submitted by libraries in major cities throughout the world, each of which can nominate up to one novel every year.
This year’s nominations include thirty novels in translation, covering nineteen languages, with works nominated by ninety-four libraries from forty countries across Africa, Europe, Asia, the United States, Canada, South America and Australia, and New Zealand. Sixteen of the titles are debut novels, including A Recipe for Daphne.
The Library of the Department of Greek Philology from the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece said of Anastasiadou’s debut: “ Because it’s a meditation on identity and the scars of history, through [Anastasiadou’s] rich characters, the Rum people’s—Greek Orthodox Christians, some of whom trace their roots back to the Byzantine Empire—painful history over the last century comes to light. It’s also a novel to be thoroughly savored, from its enticing culinary elements to its charming love stories. A Recipe For Daphne is a ground-breaking, multifaceted novel that begs to be re-read innumerable times.”
In the Libraries Comments on The Girl with Braided Hair by Rasha Adly, translated from the Arabic by Sarah Enany, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt, said: “A phantasmagoria of history and fiction that takes place in Egypt, the melting pot of eclectic cultures. Adly’s novel depicts the dichotomy between two cultures that stand wide apart: the French Campaign in Egypt and Syria that is on the wane, and an Egyptian society that had been cynical for so long about the culture of the Enlightenment. Adly portrays a mesmerizing narrative that works as a harmonious hotchpotch of art, fiction, politics, modern and old social lives, incarnated in the two major protagonists: the painted one, ‘with the braided hair’, and the modern one who tries to unearth the mystery of the former. The Napoleonic Campaign in Egypt stands as a watershed in the relation between East and West, and Adly’s novel best represents this.”
The international panel of judges who will select the shortlist and winner include: Sinéad Moriarty, writer and books ambassador for Eason’s Must Reads book club; Alvin Pang, poet, writer, editor, anthologist, translator, and researcher; Clíona Ní Ríordáin, professor of English at Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle; Emmanuel Dandaura, creative writer, literary critic, festival curator, scholar, and award-winning playwright; and Victoria White, graduate in English Literature of Trinity College Dublin, writer, and journalist.
The shortlist will be unveiled on 22 March and the winner will be announced by Lord Mayor of Dublin Alison Gilliland on 19 May 2022, as part of the opening day of International Literature Festival Dublin, which is also funded by Dublin City Council.
