The shortlist for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award was released on March 25. Sponsored by Dublin City Council, the €100,000 award is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English.
Only one of the seven works of genre interest on the longlist made it to the finals – Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. (James Bacon reviewed the book when it won the 2023 Booker Prize.)
Here are all the shortlisted titles:
Not a River – Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott)
We Are Light – Gerda Blees (translated by Michele Hutchison)
The Adversary – Michael Crummey
James – Percival Everett
Prophet Song – Paul Lynch
North Woods – Daniel Mason
The winner will be revealed by the Lord Mayor of Dublin on May 22, as part of International Literature Festival Dublin.
(1) DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE. Paul Lynch’s book Prophet Song, set in a near future Ireland, is the 2024 Fiction Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lynch’s novel also received the Booker in 2023.
(2) THE BOOKSHELF IS THEIR COSTAR. Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin have launched a weekly newsletter called Shelfies, in which they get people to talk about their favorite bookshelf, and their connection with the books on it. Shurin declares, “It is unashamedly us snooping at people’s shelves.”
Take a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves! We love books – and we’re the sort of people who love checking out other people’s collections! With Shelfies, we’ve asked a wide range of readers, authors and collectors from all walks of life to share not just their shelves with us – but the books that changed them.
From novelists to video game designers, scientists and film makers, and from London to Singapore, Ghana, Australia and New York and all points in between, Shelfies is a unique dose of book love directly into your inbox – sharing our love of books, with you.
(4) SFPA OFFICER ELECTION RESULTS. Starting January 1, 2025, Diane Severson Mori will be Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.
Science fiction often begins with a question of “what if”? And in 1960, Poul Anderson asked just such a question: What if aliens attempting to invade the Earth encountered a troop of medieval knights? And what if the knights won the ensuing struggle? This is the premise of The High Crusade, one of the most offbeat and entertaining science fiction novels of the early 1960s….
“Tonight We’re Wearing Waste Bags” by Elena Sichrovsky; Music by Patrick Urn; Read by Jenna Hanchey
“Dreamer, Passenger, Partner by Colin Alexander; Music by Phog Masheeen; Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Theme music by Dain Luscombe
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Anniversary: The Running Man (1987)
By Paul Weimer: Possibly the best of the Schwarzenegger SF movies of the late 1980’s. Yes, better than The Terminator, better than Predator, possibly on a par with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Running Man remains a biting satire of fascism, authoritarianism, consumerism, game shows, and a whole lot more.
The authoritarian hellhole that the United States, using violent game shows as an opiate to the masses is really on point, decades later, rather more plausible than ever. Some of the best (and by best, I mean scary) are some of the commercials and interstitial bits in between the actual Running Man show. The show where a man climbs a rope, trying to grab dollars with a vicious pack of dogs underneath him…or the neo-Puritanism revealed when an announcer shockingly reveals Amber may have had several lovers in a year.
Arnold strides through this film and carries it on his charisma, as a package deal with Richard Dawson, who plays Damon Killan as an evil version of his Family Feud persona. They have the best rapport and the movie sings when they finally meet each other. (I was surprised on a rewatch how long the movie actually takes to put the two of them in the same room as each other). I also think the movie hits the right level of action, adventure, social commentary, and humor.
And then there are the betting pool scenes. Long before betting truly has taken over sports, and a lot of other things, the betting on the TV show seemed to me at the time to be “over the top” (who would bet on a game show)? Naive me didn’t believe it…but in the years since, it makes absolute and corrosive sense that the general public would in fact bid on the game show and the deaths on the show. I mean, if The Running Man was made today, Draftkings would be advertising on The Running Man.
Sadly, given recent events…I think it might be too naive in thinking that the ending, where the crimes of the state being revealed lead to revolution and change, can actually be realistic in this day and age. But I can dream, right?
I don’t have any Egyptian looking trinkets in my collection, so this Olmec head my Dad brought back from Mexico years ago will have to do.
…“Remember, girls, we are looking for the Lost Tomb of Sibor. Scorpia, since your people hail from the Crimson Waste, you have knowledge of this wasteland that the Horde lacks…”
“Yes, but…”
“So I get why you need Scorpia. But why am I here, Shadow Weaver?”
“Because you are Force Captain, Catra. And because Scorpia didn’t want to go without you.”
“I’ll get you for this, Scorpia.”
“So lead the way, Scorpia. You do know where the tomb is, don’t you?”
“Yes, but… I don’t think this is a good idea, Shadow Weaver. The Tomb of Sidor is an accursed place. My people shun it and never go there.”
“Silly barbaric superstition. The Tomb of Sidor contains something of great value to the Horde and I mean to retrieve it for Lord Hordak. And now go, Scorpia. Take us to the Tomb.”
“Yes, but it’s your funeral.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Hush, Catra, she’ll hear you.”…
(10) WET WORK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It may be that there are sub-surface mini-seas on some of the moons of Uranus!
The Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 revealed an unusually off-centred planetary magnetic field. Nine US and one Brit researchers have now re-examined the Voyager Solar wind data set. It reveals that Uranus was hit by a Solar windstorm at the time of the craft’s encounter with the planet. This Solar windstorm offset the planet’s magnetic field.
Similar observations in the Saturn system reveal that when its moons with sub-ice surface water orbit outside of the protection of Saturn’s magnetic field, probes cannot detect water-group ions; this is because they have been swept away by the Solar wind. The researchers therefore hypothesise that the absence of water-group ions when Voyager 2 passed by might not be due to an absence of moons sub-surface water but due to the Solar windstorm that was raging at the time that swept those ions away. It could be that some of Uranus’ moons do have sub-surface water. They hypothesise that Uranus’s two outer moons, Titania and Oberon, are more likely candidates for harbouring liquid water oceans.
Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.
OK. So the 18th-century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.
But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, an old mill town below the wuthering, or windy, heights of West Yorkshire. And when a squall kicks up, producing a surplus of electricity from wind turbines on the moor, their phones light up with a notification, like one that informed them of a 50 percent discount one Saturday in October….
…Octopus Energy, the country’s biggest electricity supplier, runs nine wind turbines on those hills. When it’s gusty, and power is abundant, it offers discounts. The Bradleys say they save upward of 400 pounds ($517) a year. Octopus says it not only attracts customers but also persuades communities that they benefit from new energy infrastructure.
“We’ve got these famously bleak, windy hills,” said Greg Jackson, the company’s chief executive. “We wanted to demonstrate to people that wind electricity is cheaper, but only when you use it when it’s windy.”…
(12) THE DEATHS FROM TROPICAL STORMS AND HURRICANES IN THE USA HAVE BEEN GREATLY UNDERESTIMATED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In climate-change science fiction, people die in major climate events: cf. the film The Day After Tomorrow or the climate fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
In the real world, people die all the time and this enables demographers to calculate the number of expected deaths. Usually only a score or more deaths are associated with US tropical storms. These are due to obvious things like drownings or being hit by wind-blown debris.
Two US demographers have now looked the number of excess deaths (those above the expected death rate) between 1930 and 2015. They have found that there are an average of 7,000 – 11,000 excess deaths in the months following a tropical storm or hurricane. These deaths are mainly from infants (less than 1 year of age), people 1 – 44 years of age, and the black population. (Presumably the elderly were safe in a refuge while young adults were protecting property and so in harm’s way? But the very elderly also took a big hit.) The researchers did not look at the death certificates of all (around 100,000) those excess deaths over this eight-and-a-half decade period and so do not know exactly what it was they died of. This, they say, needs to be the subject of future research.
A Disney Holiday Short: The Boy & The Octopus follows the journey of a child who discovers a curious octopus has attached to his head during a seaside vacation. After returning home, the boy forms a true friendship with the octopus by introducing his new companion to his life on land — harnessing the power of the Force with his Jedi lightsaber, playing with his Buzz Lightyear action figure, and imagining Santa Claus’ route around the world with the map on his wall — before taking the lovable octopus out into the world to experience the joy of the holidays, hidden under his Mickey Mouse beanie….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cora Buhlert, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]
By James Bacon: Paul Lynch’s book Prophet Song won the Booker prize this evening. Described by Samira Ahmed Booker BBC 4 presenter and host for the evening as “Set in a near future Ireland where society is breaking down and people are becoming refugees” and Judge Esi Edugyan said that “We sought a winning novel that would transport us, we sought a winning novel that would speak to the immediate moment while also possessing the ability to outlast it… a book to remind us that we are more than ourselves, to remind us of all that is worth saving”.
Following the presentation of the award Lynch made a small speech. “This was not an easy book to write, the rational part of me believed that I was dooming me by writing this novel, though I had to write the book anyway, we do not have a choice in such matters.” He continued, “I believe that literary style should be a way of knowing how the world is met and its unfolding, senses should press into the unknown moment, into the most obscure hidden aspects of life, that which is barely known but which is asking to be released”.
When Samira Ahmed noted Prophet Song was about a country breaking down and a family becoming refugees, and asked Lynch what made him set it in Ireland he responded, ” I think it is important that novelists should be free to be counterfactual, whether they’re writing something that maybe a parallel of the present, maybe a story that projects into the future but always that asking questions about what’s timeless and what we need to pay attention to and I think that writers have a duty to push past the spectacle that we have been bombarded with for years, to break through the noise, the tyranny of the know that surround us, to create space again for the whisper in the ear that the novelist can do uniquely.”
If fans wonder why this is a novel worth reading, here is a short review.
This is a very powerful literary story, where the landscape is frighteningly familiar with situations that we are so used to happening elsewhere, far away and to others, suddenly in our own city of Dublin, on its streets, in the shops at the crossroads.
There is a style of long lovely language to it, but one where within the story the tension is tight, the tempo is quick and so the eloquence forms around the story which runs at a steady deadly fast flow, darkening at times which draws the reader ever onwards. I completed the book in less than 30 hours, finding it compelling, not an easy read, a necessary one.
I have yet to ascertain if Paul Lynch said it himself, but the setting is allegedly a near future Ireland, and crikey, it feels so close, so of the moment, situations in Dublin, in Gaza and Israel, in Ukraine and on the English Channel, all somehow reflected in this book, that was started during covid, and completed last year, an unnervingly feeling of the now, capturing what we see on screens, and throwing it into a horribly familiar setting, with a fine Irish woman, Eilish our protagonist, a mother, daughter, wife and scientist, who resonates so hard, reminding somehow me of my own Mam, but leaving you hoping no Mam would have to face such trials, and making one think of all the families, caught up in something horrible.
Eilish’s actions , decisions, choices, all so hard and challenging, dreadfully so, trying to be the best mam she can as all mams are and strive to be. The book is so descriptive one feels for Eilish, and feels her reality is unbearably real, and for many it is, but unbelievable in an Irish setting, and yet so tangible, that you could taste it, the hunger for power and control, the bloody brutality of governments and bureaucracy, the horror of war and the fear of loss.
There are many moments of sheer brilliance, the sentences and narrative, insightful, perfect, and all the time, not just some notional sense of place, but Dublin, it is so Dublin, that you are there, hearing and seeing unimaginable things, horrid appalling things, but all so possible, an underlying malevolence that we see come to rotten fruition in other places now.
It is its own book, I am not comparing it to other works, for that does a disservice to novels I love, and this book, that I have found so engaging, it is unique, distinctive in its way, brilliantly so, and its setting and situations are thoughtful and thought through. It is a dystopian novel for sure, and will sit well amongst other dystopian books, the great ones, and alternative histories, and near dark futures, and ones which straddle the place where literary fiction meets genre fiction, and readers can discern a great story, and not worry so much about labels, imposed, or pigeon holes, arbitrary or others dictating what a great story is, but enjoy good writing and reflect and think.
Here is the official back of book enticement:
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
The six novels on the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist revealed September 21 include one book of genre interest, title shown in boldface.
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
In Prophet Song, a husband and father is arrested and imprisoned by repressive government forces as Ireland slides into totalitarianism.
Author Paul Lynch did not originally expect this to be his next book:
I had previously spent six months writing the wrong book, and knew it too, but kept hammering through rock in the hope of a breakthrough. Then one Friday, about 3pm, I stopped writing and thought, this is the wrong book – I will return on Monday morning and start a new one. I could sense there was something lurking just out of sight but I didn’t know what it might be.
On Monday morning, I created a new document – Janson font, 1.5” margins, 1.6 spacing, Mac Pages. (I like the page to look like a book.) I closed my eyes and the opening page of Prophet Song arrived pretty much as you read it now. Those sentences came out of the blind and I can honestly say it is one of the miracles of my writing life. How did I know there was another book there? I really don’t know. I didn’t even know the book I was yet to write, and yet so much of the meaning of the book is encoded in those opening sentences. How is that possible? Again, I don’t know. Writers learn to trust their intuition, and there it was, the opening notes of a song that would become the book.
Lynch’s awards include the 2022 Gens de Mer Prize, the 2020 Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors’ Literary Award and the 2018 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award.
