Dublin Literary Award 2023

This gently autobiographical novel follows a writer who retrains as a chiropodist in a Berlin housing estate. Through encounters with her patients, Oskamp builds a moving portrait of ageing, loneliness, and care. Each chapter offers a brief but intimate glimpse into another life. The prose is clear, compassionate, and unadorned. Small acts of attention become quietly transformative. A tender celebration of everyday dignity.

Anthony Doerr’s ambitious novel weaves together multiple timelines, from ancient Constantinople to a near-future world under threat. At its heart is a shared love of storytelling and preservation. The novel celebrates libraries, learning, and human curiosity. Doerr balances large-scale imagination with emotional warmth. Violence and hope are tightly intertwined. An expansive, generous work about why stories endure.

Em blends personal memory with collective history to explore the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Kim Thúy writes in fragments that accumulate emotional power. Trauma is approached obliquely, through images and sensations. The prose is spare yet lyrical. Violence and tenderness coexist throughout. A delicate, resonant meditation on memory and survival.

Everett’s novel uses satire and crime fiction to confront America’s history of racial violence. A series of grotesque murders forces a reckoning with unresolved pasts. The tone shifts between dark comedy and moral outrage. Everett exposes the absurdity of denial and inaction. Beneath the humour lies deep anger. A sharp, urgent, and unsettling novel.

This formally experimental novel interrogates love amid political and personal collapse. Sajko blends essay, confession, and fiction, constantly questioning the act of writing itself. Intimacy is shaped by exile, precarity, and fear. The tone is urgent and self-aware. Love becomes both refuge and burden. A challenging, intellectually charged work.

Set in a gated Mexican community, Paradais traces the escalating rage of two young men. Melchor’s relentless prose traps the reader inside obsession and misogyny. Social inequality simmers beneath every interaction. Violence feels both inevitable and horrifying. The novel offers no comfort or release. Brutal, suffocating, and unforgettable.