Nominated by Bibliothèque de Reims, France

The 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award longlist of 79 books has been painstakingly narrowed down to a shortlist of just 6 titles. The award, sponsored by Dublin City Council, is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English, worth €100,000 to the winner. The DUBLIN Literary Award will be presented during ILFDublin. Nominated by libraries around the world, all the books on the shortlist can be read in both physical and digital formats, from libraries around the country and through BorrowBox.

This exclusive limited podcast series, hosted by Jessica Traynor and Séan Hewitt, is designed to give you access to the authors behind the 6 shortlisted titles. Their conversation about At Night All Blood is Black is followed by an interview with David Diop and his translator, Anna Moschovakis. Born in Paris, David Diop grew up in Senegal. A professor of eighteenth century literature, he draws deeply on his native culture to tell a story steeped in the horrors of war, and the scope of the human soul. Among the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War, Alfa and Mademba have formed a close bond, climbing out of their trenches together to attack France’s German enemies, time after time. Until Magemba is horrifically wounded, dying in a shell hole, one more solider who could not be saved. Without his soul-brother, Alfa quickly becomes lost in the savagery and chaos of the conflict. In attempting to make amends to his dead friend, he slowly becomes a ghost in his own strange life. A tender and violent chronicle of one man’s mind as it breaks apart.

Translator Anna Moschovakis is also a poet and an author, whose works include the James Laughlin Award-winning poetry collection You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and a novel, Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love.

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Meet your hosts! Jessica Traynor is a poet, essayist and librettist. Her debut poetry collection, Liffey Swim, was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. The Quick was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. Awards include the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and Hennessy New Writer of the Year. Paper Boat, a new opera commission from Irish National Opera and Music for Galway, will premiere in April 2022. Residencies in 2021-22 include the Yeats Society Sligo, The Seamus Heaney Home Place and the DLR LexIcon. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies, has just been published by Bloodaxe Books, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Seán Hewitt’s debut collection, Tongues of Fire, was published by Jonathan Cape (2020). It won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published with Jonathan Cape and Penguin Press (2022). He is a Poetry Critic for The Irish Times and teaches Modern British & Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin.