Both of South Africa's former Nobel literature laureates and several other former Booker Prize winners, including John Banville, feature among the 138 authors nominated for this year's International Impac Dublin Literary Award by 169 libraries in 49 countries throughout the world. Also longlisted is playwright Sebastian Barry with his Booker runner-up, A Long, Long Way.
JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer are joined by five other South Africans, while North America is particularly well represented with 40 nominees. There are 28 US writers, including Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis and Joyce Carol Oates, while former Booker winner Margaret Atwood is the most famous of the 12 Canadians longlisted.
Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel prize for literature, has been longlisted for Memories of My Melancholy Whores.
Included among the 22 longlisted British writers is Julian Barnes for Arthur & George and former Booker winner Ian McEwan for Saturday. Another former Booker winner, the Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro who moved to England when he was four, has been nominated for Never Let Me Go, the novel which pushed Banville's The Sea all the way to the post for the 2005 Man Booker Prize.
Ishiguro's novel, a menacingly beautiful book about human cloning, has been nominated by 18 libraries. The second highest number of nominations, 12, was earned by another Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, for Kafka On The Shore.
As always with this prize, the longlist reflects a wide range of library reader preference. High-profile novels invariably feature as a result of review space and good performances on other prize lists, most notably the Booker, while established names are guaranteed a readership - for example, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Ali Smith have each been nominated, as has a former Impac winner Michel Houellebecq.
It is satisfying to note Australian Kate Grenville's inclusion for The Secret River, a powerful novel about her country's colonial experience.
Most reassuring of all though, is the inclusion of quiet, subtle novels such as Norwegian Per Petterson's wonderful relaxed elegy, Out Stealing Horses, highlighted alongside one of the finest French novels in recent years, Pierre Péju's The Girl from the Chartreuse, and Jacques-Pierre Amette's intriguingly convincing Brecht's Lover.
It is a long way to the shortlist, due out on April 4th, 2007, and European fiction does appear to have been somewhat overpowered by the might of the US, South America and Africa. JM Coetzee's Slow Man and Kazuo Ishiguro's darkly prophetic work should make it to the next stage, while Europe's literary honour could well be carried by a sleeper such as Petterson or Russian Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov.