Impac award shortlist announced

The shortlist for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award was announced today.

Irish author Patrick McCabe's Winterwoodis on the eight-strong shortlist for the €100,000 prize.

The others are De Niro's Gameby Rawi Hage; The Speed of Lightby Javier Cercas; Dreams of Speakingby Gail Jones; Andrei Makine's The Woman Who Waited; The Attackby Yasmina Khadra and Let It Be Morningby Sayed Kashua.

The list was whittled down from a longlist of 137 novelists from 45 countries writing in 15 languages.

The other Irish nominees on the longlist were: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamasby John Boyne; The Secret Life of E.Robert Pendletonby Michael Collins; This Man and Meby Alison Jameson; Tenderwireby Claire Kilroy and Zoliby Colum McCann.

The longlist also included Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, which won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Mr Pipby Lloyd Jones - which won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize - also features.

Last year's winner was Norwegian author Per Petterson for Out Stealing Horses. Colm Tóibín became the first Irish winner of the prize in 2006 with The Master. 

The Impac, which was initiated in 1994, is managed by Dublin City Libraries and is the world's largest literary prize for a single work of fiction

Works are nominated by participating libraries and can be written in any language provided it has also been published in English. Some 161 libraries in 121 cities nominated works.

This year's winner will be named on June 12th.