Valeria Luiselli wins the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award

The Mexican author Valeria Luiselli has picked up one of the world’s richest literary prizes in the 2021 Dublin International Literary Award, which has just been given to her novel Lost Children Archive.

Valeria Luiselli (Photo by Diego Berruecos).

First awarded in 1996, the Dublin International Literary Award is presented annually to a novel written or translated into English, with the nominations coming from libraries in major world cities. The author of the winning book receives €100,000 in prize money ($157,230 AUD), with previous winners including Anna Burns for Milkman and Emily Ruskovich for Idaho.

Longlisted for both the 2019 Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Lost Children Archive tells the story of a New York family on a road trip to Mexico, interspersed with stories of children trying to make it across the US-Mexican border from the south. It was picked from a shortlist that included Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other, Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Judge Colm Tóibín said, ‘Luiselli has written a novel in which stories spiral. She has rendered her characters with astonishing grace and insight, and through them she has drawn a picture of what they have been driving towards throughout the book, the contested place, where the old rules do not apply, for which a new form of archive is needed.’

In her acceptance speech broadcast, Valeria Luiselli thanked the judges and described her winning book as ‘a novel about the process of making stories, of threading voices and ideas together in an attempt to better understand the world around us. It is a novel about fiction.’

Congratulations to Valeria Luiselli!

—Lost Children Archive by Valieria Luiselli (HarperCollins Australia) is out now.

Find out more about the International Dublin Literary Award here.

Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

The moving, powerful and urgent English-language debut from one of the brightest young stars in world literature

Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. What would happen then? A family in New York packs the car and sets out on a road trip. This will be the last journey they ever take together. In Central America and Mexico, thousands of children are on a journey of their own, travelling north to the US border. Not all of them will make it there...

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