International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2012

Judging Panel

Elizabeth Nunez emigrated from Trinidad to the U.S.A. after completing high school.  She received her Ph.D. in English from New York University and is a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of eight novels: Boundaries; Anna In-Between (2010 PEN Oakland Literary Award); Prospero's Daughter (Trinidad and Tobago One Book, One Community selection), and 2006 Novel of the Year Black Issues Book Review); Grace; Discretion (short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award); Bruised Hibiscus (American Book Award); Beyond the Limbo Silence (Independent Publishers Book Award); and When Rocks Dance. Nunez is co-editor of the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad. She is the co-founder of the National Black Writers Conference and executive producer of the 2004 NY Emmy-nominated CUNY TV series Black Writers in America.

Born in 1965, Mike McCormack grew up in the West of Ireland.  He has published a collection of short stories Getting it in the Head and two novels – Crowe’s Requiem and Notes from a Coma.  In 1996, McCormack was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 1998, Getting it in the Head was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. McCormack’s current novel Notes from a Comawas short-listed for the Irish Book of the Year Award and  John Waters from The Irish Times described it as ‘the greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended’. McCormack lives in Galway city.

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard before moving permanently to Italy in 1981. Author of three bestselling books on Italy, plus a dozen novels, including the Booker short-listed Europa, he has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso and, most recently, Machiavelli. While running a post-graduate degree course in translation at IULM University, Milan, he writes regularly for the LRB and the NYRB. His non-fiction works include, Translating Style, a literary approach to translation problems, Medici Money, an account of the relation between banking, the Church and art in the 15th century, and, most recently, Teach Us to Sit Still, which was described by David Lodge as: “A searingly honest, viscerally vivid, darkly comic self-examination of the connections between writing, personality and health.”

Evelyn Schlag was born in 1952 in Waidhofen/Ybbs (Lower Austria). She studied German and English Language and Literature at the University of Vienna. She is an award-winning poet and novelist, listed for the European Aristeion Prize in 1998. Evelyn is also translator of contemporary English and American poetry and has done readings all over Europe (including Hay Festival of Literature 1992, Hay Festival Segovia 2011), the USA (incl. PEN World Voices Festival 2008), Canada (including Harborfront Festival of Literature Toronto 1987), Russia. Evelyn has given poetry lectures at Graz and Klagenfurt Universities and was writer-in-residence in Carlisle, PA. She was also lecturer for poetry at the Institut für Sprachkunst (University of Applied Arts Vienna) 2010-2011. Evelyn lives in Waidhofen/Ybbs

Dubravka Ugresic

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.  The second novel of his political thriller trilogy, The Report to the Judicicary, was published in 2008. When not recalled to the Federal Bench, Judge Sullivan is a partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Freeh, Sporkin & Sullivan, LLP.