THE judges for the 1996/97 Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Irish Times Irish Literature Prizes are announced total of today. The prizes are worth a £22,500; the three winners of the Irish Literatures Prizes - for fiction, poetry and non fiction prose - will each receive £5,000, with £7,500 going to the author of the winning work in the International Fiction Prize category.
The judges for the International Fiction Prize are the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for biography and former literary editor of the Los Angeles Times, Jack Miles, who will act as chairman; writer, critic and chancellor of the University of Ulster Julia Neuberger; and novelist, short story writer and scriptwriter Carlo Gebler.
The panel for the Irish Literature Prizes will be chaired by the English novelist and critic A. S. Byatt, who will be joined by poet Michael Davitt; novelist and playwright Emma Donoghue; UCD lecturer - Jerusha McCormack and historian and author Professor John A. Murphy.
The international prize is for a work of fiction written in English and published in Ireland, Britain or the US between August 1st 1995, and July 31st 1997.
Work eligible for the Irish Literature Prizes must be by an Irish author, published in Ireland, Britain or the US between August 1st 1995 and July 1st 1997, and can be in either English or Irish. Works of history, biography, autobiography, politics, criticism, travel, current affairs and belles lettres are among the categories eligible for the non fiction prize.
Four titles will be shortlisted for the International Fiction Prize and three for each of the Irish Literature Prizes in early September, 1997. The winning books will be announced at the beginning of October.
THE winner of the International Fiction Prize in 1995 was South African writer J. M. Coetzee for his novel The Master of Petersburg.
Other previous winners in this category were: Don DeLillo for Libra, in 1989; A. S. Byatt for Possession (1990); Louis Begley for Wartime Lies (1991); Norman Rush for Mat ing (1992); and E. Annie Proulx for The Shipping News (1993).
Shortlisted authors have included John Irving, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, John McGahern, William Trevor, Alice Munro, John Updike, Russell Banks, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, David Malouf, Jane Smiley, Cormac McCarthy, Vikram Seth and Penelope Fitzgerald.
Previous winners of Irish Literature Prizes are: Frank Ronan for his debut novel The Men Who Loved Evelyn Cotton; John McGahern for Amongst Women; Ciaran Carson for Belfast Confetti; Professor J. J. Lee for Ireland 1912-1985; Colm Toibin for his first novel The South; Patrick McCabe for The Butcher Boy; Derek Mahon for his Selected Poems; Brian Keenan for An Evil Cradling; John MacKenna for The Fallen and Other Stories; Kathleen Ferguson for A Maid's Tale; Robert Greacen for Collected Poems; and Paddy Devlin for Straight Left in 1995.
Rules, conditions and other details of the prizes are available from the administrator, Gerard Cavanagh, in The Irish Times.
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