International Literature Festival Dublin 2022 presents

an array of award winning authors this May including

Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah & Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut

After two years of online events, ILFDublin is delighted to once again welcome authors from around the world to gather in-person in Dublin city for this 11 day celebration of writing and literature. This year ILFDublin has a new home, a Literary Village which will, for the 11 days, be set up in Merrion Square Park, a beautiful space in the heart of the city and surrounded by a rich and unique literary history. The 2022 festival programme features an exciting array of award winning writers from over 20 countries.

On 20 May ILFDublin will welcome the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah to Dublin. An outspoken interrogator of complacent postcolonial perspectives, Gurnah shows how fiction can offer compelling insights into global history. The author of ten powerful novels, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 for Paradise, his narratives are steeped in memory and explore the things we find unspeakable. In the personal, he interrogates the political. His latest novel Afterlives asks what an unimaginable future can hold, unfolding in the wake of an unspeakable past. In this event at the ILFDublin Literary Village he discusses his work with fellow writer Christine Dwyer Hickey.

Booker prize winner Damon Galgut returns to Dublin on 24 May to discuss his writing and the winning novel: The Promise. The South African author was twice nominated for the Booker Prize before finally winning it last year. As a literary form, the novel has a unique capacity to capture the realities of life and the things we shouldn’t forget. Damon Galgut was praised by the Booker Prize judges for exactly this feat in 2021 when The Promise was awarded the prestigious prize. Set on a farm on the outskirts of Pretoria, and focusing on a seemingly ordinary family in crisis, Galgut’s novel asks relentless questions of the past and the present, and of the ways in which we deny ourselves and each other when confronted with truth.

The programme will also feature Scholastique Mukasonga, winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot 2012, which is awarded annually to the author of an outstanding original novel. Mukasonga will speak about her new book, The Barefoot Woman, where she recovers her lost family’s story out of the Rwandan genocide, illustrating the power of the memoir to recover individual stories out of the tragedy of national history.

Audiences can also look forward to Pulitzer Prize winners; Margo Jefferson (Pulitzer Prize 1995 for her New York Times journalism and recipient earlier this year of a Windham Campbell Prize) on a rare visit to Dublin to discuss her electrifying new memoir, Constructing a Nervous System and Jennifer Egan (Pulitzer Prize 2011 for A Visit From The Goon Squad) chatting about The Candy House, her latest novel which is a sibling novel to the Pulitzer prize winning title.

And there may be more prize winners to come as awards continue to be announced, for example Mieko Kawakami who is shortlisted for the upcoming International Booker Prize for her novel Heaven and will be at the Festival discussing her new book All The Lovers In The Night as well as the nominated title too.

Also as part of ILFDublin 2022 the winner of the DUBLIN Literary Award will also be announced, the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English. In advance of the announcement get to know the shortlisted authors in a 6-part, limited edition podcast series hosted by Jessica Traynor and Seán Hewitt at ilfdublin.com

Tickets priced €15 / €12.50 are on sale now via ilfdublin.com or email boxoffice@ilfdublin.com