Updated with the shortlist announcement 22/3/22. Shortlisted titles are in bold.
The Dublin LitAward was announced during my sojourn on Phillip Island while we had our floors re-polished, so this is a bit late. As usual I have tried to identify the nominees from Australia and New Zealand, but if I’ve missed any, please let me know.
The shortlist will be announced on 22nd March, and the winner on 19th May. For more information, visit the award website. Novels are listed in alphabetical order of the title, with Aussie and Kiwi titles highlighted in green.
Update 20/2/22 Claire at Word by Word has posted a similar list, and she has reviewed some that I haven’t. Visit her blog to access her reviews here.
| Title, and link to my review if there is one. | Name of author |
| A Million Aunties, see my review | Alecia McKenzie |
| A Recipe for Daphne | Nektaria Anastasiadou |
| Acts of Desperation | Megan Nolan |
| All God’s Children | Aaron Gwyn |
| Antkind | Charlie Kaufman |
| At Night all Blood is Black, on my TBR | David Diop |
| Barry Squires: Full Tilt | Heather Smith |
| Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow | João Reis |
| Before You Knew My Name | Jacqueline Bublitz |
| Betty | Tiffany McDaniel |
| Black Bottom Saints | Alice Randall |
| Brighten the Corner Where You Are | Carol Bruneau |
| Butter Honey Pig Bread | Francesca Ekwuyasi |
| Catch the Rabbit | Lana Bastašić |
| Crooked Hallelujah Kelli | Jo Ford |
| Crossmatch | Carmel Miranda |
| Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear | Matthew Salesses |
| Fresh Water for Flowers | Valérie Perrin |
| Grey Bees | Andrey Kurkov |
| Here is the Beehive | Sarah Crossan |
| I is Another: Septology III-V, see my review of the whole series | Jon Fosse |
| In Memory of Memory | Maria Stepanova |
| In Search of a Name | Marjolijn Van Heemstra |
| Indians on Vacation | Thomas King |
| Infinite Country | Patricia Engel |
| Jack | Marilynne Robinson |
| Kin | Miljenko Jergović |
| Klara & the Sun, see my review | Kazou Ishiguro |
| Kraft | Jonas Lüscher |
| Lay Figures | Mark Blagrave |
| Longevity Park | Zhou Daxin |
| Love in Five Acts | Daniela Krien |
| Low Expectations | Stuart Everly-Wilson |
| Migrations | Charlotte McConaghy |
| Miss Iceland | Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir |
| No One is Talking About This | Patricia Lockwood |
| Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies | Leanne Simpson |
| October Child | Linda Boström Knausgård |
| Olive | Emma Gannon |
| One Left | Kim Soom |
| Piranesi, on my TBR | Susanna Clarke |
| Punching The Air | Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam |
| Ramifications | Daniel Saldaña París |
| Remote Sympathy , see my review | Catherine Chidgey |
| Second Place | Rachel Cusk |
| Song of the Crocodile see my review | Nardi Simpson |
| Sprigs | Brannavan Gnanalingam |
| Strange Flowers | Donal Ryan |
| The Art of Falling | Danielle McLaughlin |
| The Art of Losing see my review | Alice Zeniter |
| The Bitch | Pilar Quintana |
| The Death of Vivek Oji, see my review | Akwaeke Emezi |
| The Dictionary of Lost Words, see my review | Pip Williams |
| The Disaster Tourist | Yun Ko-eun |
| The Employees A workplace novel of the 22nd century | Olga Ravn |
| The Fig Tree | Goran Vojnović |
| The Girl with Braided Hair | Rasha Adly |
| The Hummingbird | Sandro Veronesi |
| The Imago Stage | Karoline Georges |
| The Labyrinth, see my review | Amanda Lohrey |
| The Lamplighters | Emma Stonex |
| The Last Queen | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni |
| The Masochist | Katja Perat |
| The New Wilderness (abandoned at p.73) | Diane Cook |
| The Octopus Man | Jasper Gibson |
| The Other Black Girl | Zakiya Dalila Harris |
| The Prophets | Robert Jones |
| The Survivors | Jane Harper |
| Transcendent Kingdom | Yaa Gyasi |
| Twenty After Midnight | Daniel Galera |
| Utopia Avenue, on my TBR | David Mitchell |
| Voices of the Lost | Hoda Barakat |
| What Are You Going Through | Sigrid Nunez |
| Whereabouts, on my TBR | Jhumpa Lahiri |
| Who is Ma Kemah? | Sianah Nalika DeShield |
| Women Dreaming | Salma |
| Xstabeth | David Keenan |
| You, Me & the Sea | Elizabeth Haynes |
| Your Story, My Story | Connie Palmen |
Congratulations to all the authors, editors and publishers!
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
I missed this too, but then I’ve been out of touch with my reading life since December, time to wake up and see what’s going on, so thanks for this reminder. Lots that familiar and unfamiliar on here.
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By: Claire 'Word by Word' on February 13, 2022
at 5:56 pm
Is everything ok?
I’ve been a bit AWOL over the last fortnight because of the abovementioned floor repolishing (necessitating moving everything fragile plus (a-hem) some books from uncarpeted areas to carpeted areas, even though we paid the tradies to move the furniture… I’ve still got 16 boxes of books to unpack.) I thought I’d get lots of reading done while we were away but it didn’t work out like that at all.
There are a lot of names unfamiliar to me…
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By: Lisa Hill on February 13, 2022
at 6:02 pm
Yes all is well, it’s the effect of having had visitors around for 6 weeks, which is highly unusual for winter, but meant no downtime at all for solitary pursuits and adult conversation every evening. I feel like I’ve just come out of summer, only now it’s signs of spring that are appearing.
Good luck with the unpacking and reacquaintance with all those books!
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By: Claire 'Word by Word' on February 13, 2022
at 8:24 pm
LOL I’ve just unpacked them all, and sorted them alphabetically… and now I can’t see how they all fitted into the bookshelves before and now they don’t…
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By: Lisa Hill on February 13, 2022
at 10:37 pm
Thanks for linking back to my also belated post. I did enjoy spending a few hours linking every title to a a description, which meant having a better comprehension of what’s on the list, it being such a vast list.The Voice France was on in the background, so it felt kind of like knitting, the one blog post that didn’t require any thinking, but was rewarding all the same. :)
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By: Claire 'Word by Word' on February 20, 2022
at 7:27 pm
Hopefully some of us will now come across some of the titles and review them!
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By: Lisa Hill on February 20, 2022
at 10:12 pm
That’s a very long longlist!
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By: Liz Dexter on February 14, 2022
at 5:49 am
It always is, for this award.
It’s a bit of a strange one: the longlist comes from libraries around the world, who nominate a favoured book published in, or translated into English. I say ‘favoured’ rather than ‘favourite’ or ‘best’ because libraries exist to encourage people to read, and so they promote all kinds of books that are not especially literary. My library stocks LitFic, but the ‘New Books’ on the display shelves are popular genres and commercial fiction. So among the Australian nominees we see two books which couldn’t be more different: The Labyrinth (winner of the MF) and Jane Harper’s latest bestseller. (I’d love to be a fly on the wall at a library where they are doing the choosing!)
However I have never known the judges to give the award to genre or commercial fiction, so there must be some kind of criteria that they use to sift it out from the shortlist…
If you check out WP, you can see that there are some really wonderful books on the shortlists. I’ve bought and read a lot of the winners too and never been disappointed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Dublin_Literary_Award
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By: Lisa Hill on February 14, 2022
at 11:51 am
I don’t know many of these. Quite an extensive list. 🐧🤠🌷
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By: TravellinPenguin (Pam) on February 14, 2022
at 10:10 pm
Same here… I don’t remember hearing about most of them…
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By: Lisa Hill on February 14, 2022
at 10:37 pm
As always an oreruhelmhgly long list of a lot of books I’ve never heard of. I love that they do this but I rarely take much of it in. I’ve reviewed a couple (that you have) And have heard of a couple. I hear Whereabouts is good. Haven’t read her for a long time.
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By: whisperinggums on February 15, 2022
at 4:49 am
LOL I’ve never got on with Jhumpa Lahiri. That is one of the books I bought during lockdown when I went out of my way (and over my budget) to buy books from my two favourite booksellers, alternating what is (for me) a big order between them each month. Whereabouts is one that I bought to ‘fill up’ my order…
I won’t tell you about the Australian ones that I bought to support authors in their time of need, that never got past page 50!
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By: Lisa Hill on February 15, 2022
at 8:45 am
Oh dear, that’s a shame Lisa. I liked The namesake and Interpreter of maladies, but I felt she was stuck in the same themes do stopped there.
I hope all those you bought and didn’t like went to good homes!! And I hope there weren’t too many of them.
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By: whisperinggums on February 15, 2022
at 9:17 am
I have a Little Library by my front fence, and there are keen readers who stop by regularly!
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By: Lisa Hill on February 15, 2022
at 9:18 am
Ah yes, I think you said that. Excellent. I bet you have some regulars…
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By: whisperinggums on February 15, 2022
at 9:52 am
I do. There’s one lady who leaves me little post-it notes, and I’d love to catch her at it so that I can say hello and maybe have coffee at our little local. (We have a new South American bakery in our small local shopping centre and they make irresistible pastries including Portuguese tarts that are *exactly* like the ones you get in Lisbon.)
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By: Lisa Hill on February 15, 2022
at 10:02 am
You’ll have to set up a buzzer like shops have so that you get notified every time someone opens the door. Haha.
We have a new pastry shop in our little shops… Too small to call a centre as just about 4 shops! They opened in late 2020 and are a lovely young Chinese couple. They are perfectionists. They recently added Portuguese tarts to their products, and several of our neighbours say they’re the best in town. I’ve had a bite of Mr Gums’ and they seem the real deal to me. We love going there… They make a beautiful gf cake on weekends and have also started making mochi on weekends. They make traditional pastry but are gradually introducing Asian specialities. Weekdays I just have coffee!
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By: whisperinggums on February 15, 2022
at 10:12 am
Our little local in what real estate agents call The Golden Triangle, only has 7 but it includes a Foodworks so I reckon that makes it qualify as a ‘centre’.
However, within walking distance but outside the main roads that encircle us (can you encircle a triangle? Probably not) we have four centres big and small. There’s a mega one with an Officeworks and a Bunnings and a Petbarn for Amber’s grooming plus an Aldi and a nice coffee shop, there’s another one based around a Woollies with an arcade that has a good butcher and fish shop, there’s the strip shopping centre where we buy most of our fresh produce and it hosts the library, plus there’s a small strip that has a big pharmacy and no less than four eateries plus a liquor store. Who needs a car? Not me!
(Well, except to get to Latin in Hawthorn and French in Hampton.)
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By: Lisa Hill on February 15, 2022
at 11:00 am
That’s really great Lisa. We have two other centres nearby that we can walk to but often don’t…. The bigger one because we often buy too much to carry there and the other because it’s too hot or too cold or we don’t have time or we’re on our way to or from somewhere or we’re too lazy. Last time we walked I fell as we were going cross country and I wasn’t watching my feet. Fortunately only my pride was hurt!
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By: whisperinggums on February 15, 2022
at 11:25 am
It’s interesting that some real estate agents promote ‘walkability’ as a concept i.e. how easy it is to walk to various bits of community infrastructure…
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By: Lisa Hill on February 15, 2022
at 1:09 pm
BTW isn’t it great to have a lovely local. I do hope you catch your reader one day! I love that she leaves notes. Do others leave books in your library?
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By: whisperinggums on February 15, 2022
at 10:14 am
Alas, yes they do, and at the moment there is a fat Ken Follett taking up more room than it deserves. I am pleased to see that nobody wants to borrow it which tells me that my local clientele is a discerning bunch of readers! In due course I shall take it to the OpShop where it is more likely to find a buyer.
We are very lucky here, our little local shopping centre somehow manages to survive and thrive despite having only the local trade, no passing trade at all. But collectively, we work at it. During Lockdowns the local FB group suggested that we all buy takeaway to prevent local eateries being left with fresh produce to throw out, and people have done that. In other shopping centres I see closed eateries everywhere, but not one of ours has closed and it’s all down to customer loyalty.
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By: Lisa Hill on February 15, 2022
at 10:52 am
That’s excellent. This little patisserie survived as did the IGA but they’re the landlords. There’s nothing else in retail except for the dog grooming place which also survived. The restaurant is owned by the landlord and they’d closed it before COVID. We are waiting waitimv for its next iteration but the landlord is a bit mañana.
Sounds like a good plan for Follett.
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By: whisperinggums on February 15, 2022
at 11:19 am
This award is such fun; I love looking to see which libraries nominated which books (although of course I don’t recognise most of them Heheh).
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By: Marcie McCauley on February 20, 2022
at 9:46 am
I keep meaning to ask my libraries if they nominate!
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By: Lisa Hill on February 20, 2022
at 9:48 am
I can guess what you’ll be cheering for :-)
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By: Kate W on February 27, 2022
at 11:51 pm
Mmmm…. not so easy. My own personal shortlist is easy: The Labyrinth, Song of the Crocodile and Remote Sympathy — but after that, as usual I can’t make up my mind.
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By: Lisa Hill on February 28, 2022
at 10:25 am