Then, all of a sudden, in a brutal flash, with no warning, their happiness and their love are destroyed forever.

They build a house with their own hands two children are born – May and June. As yet, they know nothing about the winter that will entrap them: masses of snow, no plow, no neighbours, the next settlement eight miles away. A young couple, Jenny and Wade, move from the prairies to the utter loneliness and unexpected isolation of the Northern Idaho mountains where they carelessly bought a piece of wooded land on a steep mountainside. Posted by International Dublin Literary Award on Wednesday, June 12, 2019Īt the heart of Emily Ruskovich’s haunting debut novel is the inexplicable. Seeing my name beside theirs when the shortlist was announced-that alone was one of the greatest honours of my career. I am especially honoured because of the admiration that I feel for the other finalists, authors from all over the world who are all doing such crucial and beautiful work. I feel overwhelmed with the enormity of my gratitude. It is difficult to know how to respond to the magnitude of this kindness that has been so suddenly bestowed upon me. I cannot express how grateful I am to be the recipient of this astonishingly generous award. The thirty-three-year-old’s debut novel was put forward for the prize by just one library: a branch in Bruges, Belgium. Idaho was chosen from a total of 141 nominated novels, nominated by libraries in 115 cities across forty-one countries in Africa, Europe, Asia, the United States and Canada, South America and Australia and New Zealand. Ruskovich is the fourth American author to win the prize in its twenty-four-year history.

Three African authors were nominated for the award, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Zinzi Clemmons and Omar El Akkad, but none made the ten-book shortlist. The award, worth €100,000 (about R1.65 million) and awarded annually to ‘a single work of fiction published in English’, is organised by Dublin City Council in Ireland, with nominations being submitted by library systems in major cities throughout the world. American author Emily Ruskovich has won the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award, known as ‘the world’s richest annual literary prize’, for her novel Idaho.

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