International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2010

Judging Panel

Anne Fine has written eight highly acclaimed novels for adults and is also one of Britain's most prestigious writers for children, having twice won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's Book Award. Among her other prizes are the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, two Smarties awards, and many other regional and foreign prizes. In 2003 Anne became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. As Children's Laureate she set up www.myhomelibrary.orgoffering free downloadable modern bookplates, and published three anthologies of classic and modern poetry for different age groups, called A Shame to Miss 1, 2 & 3. In 2003 she was awarded an OBE for her contribution to literature. Her work has been translated into thirty five languages. She has two daughters, and lives in County Durham. Her website is www.annefine.co.uk.

Anatoly Kudryavitsky was born in 1954 in Moscow of a Polish father and half-Irish mother. He lives in Co. Dublin and writes in both English and Russian. His novel titled The Case-Book of Inspector Mylls has been published by Zakharov Books (Moscow, Russia) in 2008. He has also published a novella, a number of short stories, seven books of his Russian poems and two collections of his English poems, as well as an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in English translation. His poems and short stories have been translated into eleven languages. He was the recipient of a number of literary awards.

Eve Patten is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, where she specialises in Irish writing and in the nineteenth and twentieth-century novel. She has published widely on contemporary British and Irish fiction and is a contributing author to the Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (2006). She regularly reviews new fiction for the Irish Times and is an essayist for the British Council's Contemporary Writers series (www.contemporarywriters.com). Her recent books include That Island Never Found (2007) and Literatures of War (2008), and she is author of a forthcoming study of the novelist Olivia Manning. She was awarded Fellowship of Trinity College in 2005, and lives in Dublin with her husband and two children.

Abdourahman Waberi is a major writer from the African nation of Djibouti. An essayist, novelist, teacher, poet and short story writer, Waberi is partially based in France and has been named one of the 50 Writers of the Future by the French literary mag Lire. Most of his works were originally published in French. His latest novel in English, In the United States of Africa [trans David and Nicole Ball, Nebraska Press], is a bold and fantastic vision of an Africa never before presented in literature. Passage des Larmes, published in 2009 in Paris, is both a thriller devoted to his beloved country endangered by Islamist Fundamentalists and a subtle homage to German Jew philosopher Walter Benjamin.Waberi is currently teaching African literature at Claremont Mc Kenna College, California.

Zoë Wicomb

Hon. Eugene R. Sullivan, non-voting chair of the judging panel, is a former Chief Judge of a US Court of Appeals and brings a wealth of experience from sixteen years on the bench. His first novel, The Majority Rules, was published in 2005.  His second novel of his political thriller trilogy, The Report to the Judiciary, was published in 2008. Judge Sullivan is currently a senior partner in Freeh Group International, a global consultant group of former judges based in Washington DC: Wilmington, Delaware; London and Rome.