4 Canadian authors among nominees for $163K Dublin Literary Award

Four Canadian authors, Maria Reva, Kyle Edwards, Éric Chacour and Elizabeth Murphy, are nominated for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award.

The €100,000 (approx. $162,450 Cdn) prize annually recognizes the best work of fiction in English from anywhere in the world. 

The Dublin prize’s 69-book list is compiled by library nominations from around the world. 

Reva is nominated for her novel Endling, which won the 2025 Writers’ Trust Atwood Gibson Prize for fiction.

ln Endling, Yeva, a scientist, is obsessed with breeding rare snails and lives on her own in a mobile lab, funding her work by dating Westerners who have come to Ukraine on romance tours, hoping to find brides untouched by feminism.

Sisters Nastia and Solomiya are also entwined in the marriage industry, pretending to be a prospective bride and her translator to figure out what happened to their mother, a staunch activist against the industry who mysteriously disappeared.

As Russia invades, their plans are foiled and the hard truths of war are examined, bringing in Ukraine-born Reva’s experiences grappling with the destruction in real life.

Reva is an author and opera librettist who was born in Ukraine and grew up in New Westminster, B.C., where she currently lives. Her short story collection Good Citizens Need Not Fear won the 2022 Kobzar Literary Award and was on the 2020 Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize shortlist. Endling is her debut novel and was also longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Edwards is nominated for his debut novel Small Ceremonies, which also won the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.

Small Ceremonies follows a hockey team of Ojibwe high schoolers from Winnipeg, who are chasing hockey dreams and coming of age in a game — and a place — that can be both beautiful and brutal.

Edwards is an Anishinaabe journalist and writer from the Lake Manitoba First Nation. He is a member of the Ebb and Flow First Nation. He has won two National Magazine Awards in Canada, and he was recognized as an emerging Indigenous journalist by the Canadian Association of Journalists.

He is currently a Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California, where he is pursuing a PhD in creative writing and literature.

Chacour is on the list for his novel What I Know About You, translated from French by Pablo Strauss.

In What I Know About You, Tarek is on the right path: he’ll be a doctor like his father, marry and have children. But when he falls for his patient’s son, Ali, his life is turned upside down as he realizes his sexuality against a backdrop of political turmoil in 1960s Cairo. In the 2000s, Tarek is now a doctor in Montreal. When someone begins to write to him and about him, the past that he’s been trying to forget comes back to haunt him. 

Chacour is a Montreal-based writer who was born to Egyptian parents and grew up between France and Quebec. He previously worked in the financial sector. What I Know About You is his first book and was a bestseller in its French edition, winning many awards, including the Prix Femina. 

What I Know About You was shortlisted for the 2024 Atwood Gibson Prize for fiction and the 2024 Giller Prize.

LISTEN | Éric Chacour on Bookends with Mattea Roach:

Bookends with Mattea Roach34:28Eric Chacour: Exploring the power of familial expectations and forbidden love

Murphy is nominated for her novel The Weather Diviner, set in 1942 Newfoundland.

It’s about Violet Morgan, an amateur weather forecaster with a sixth sense for predicting the tumultuous island storms, who moves to St. John’s to help the Allies fight the enemy in the Second World War.

Murphy, born and raised in Newfoundland, now lives in Nova Scotia. A teacher, administrator and professor, The Weather Diviner is her second novel. It was nominated for the 2024 BMO Winterset Award. 

Authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rachel Kushner, Alan Hollinghust and Ocean Vuong, all of whom who have been guests on Bookends with Mattea Roach, were also nominated for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award.

For the first time this year, the jury will select a 20-book long list from the books nominated by the libraries. Then, they’ll narrow it down to the 6-book shortlist and, finally, the winner.

The 2026 jury is composed of translator Clara Ministral, book reviewer and former diplomat Daniel Mulhall, performance poet Dike Chukwumerije and authors Disha Bose and Xiaolu Guo.

The jury is chaired by Chris Morash, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, who does not vote.

The long list will be announced on Feb. 17, the short list will be announced on April 7 and the winner will be revealed on May 21.

Last year’s winner was Newfoundland author Michael Crummey for his novel The Adversary.

The other two Canadians that have won the prize since its 1996 inception are Alistair MacLeod in 2001 for No Great Mischief and Rawi Hage in 2008 for De Niro’s Game.