Nominated by Ottawa Public Library, Canada

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 Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies is followed by an interview with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Leanne is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, musician, and member of the Alderville First Nation. Interrogating the intersections between politics, story, song, Leanne has created an essential work of decolonisation, a hymn to the natural world, and a reclamation of indigenous culture. Mashkawaji (they/them) lies prone, frozen in ice and remembering a time of hopeless connection. Finding freedom in this strange suspension, they introduce us to the novel’s seven main characters, each of whom stand for aspects of the narrator’s existence. Each of the seven attempts to commune with the unnatural, man-made urban world, with its disposable objects, its fragile culture. Witnessing the corruption and exploitation of the natural world, the seven are torn away from their true selves. A pioneering work, infused with the power of myth, the timelessness of fable.

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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.