May 23, 2024, 8:30am
Today, Dublin City Council announced the winner of the prestigious 2024 Dublin Literary Award: Solenoid, by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter.
The Dublin Literary Award comes with a hefty €100,000 purse, with Cărtărescu taking home €75,000, and Cotter €25,000. Solenoid, published by Deep Vellum, is the 12th novel in translation, and the first Romanian novel, to win the award.
The 2024 Judging Panel, led by Professor Chris Morash of Trinity College Dublin, and including Ingunn Snædal, Daniel Medin, Lucy Collins, Anton Hur and Irenosen Okojie, selected the novel from a shortlist of six books, itself culled from a longlist of 70 titles, nominated by 80 libraries in 35 countries.
“By turns wildly inventive, philosophical, and lyrical, with passages of great beauty, Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little known to English-language readers,” the judges said. “Sean Cotter’s translation of the novel sets out to change that situation, capturing the lyrical precision of the original, thereby opening up Cărtărescu’s work to an entirely new readership.”