Eco heads literary prize longlist

Novels by Umberto Eco, Margaret Drabble and Rohinton Mistry have made the longlist for The International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2004.

They are among 125 authors competing for the 100,000 euros (£71,000) prize - the world's biggest for a single work of fiction in English.

Others include AS Byatt, John Updike, Annie Proulx, Zadie Smith, JM Coetzee, Jeffrey Eugenides and Donna Tartt.

Nominations for the prize were made by 162 libraries in 47 countries.

Impac facts Features 35 titles in translation Covers 16 non-English languages Longlist includes works from 43 nationalities Works translated from Hebrew, Slovenian, Polish, Chinese and Serbian

Italian writer Eco and US author Eugenides were the libraries' favourites with 11 nominations each.

Eco is listed for his work Baudolino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver, while Eugenides has a nomination for his book Middlesex.

They are followed closely by Canadian-Indian writer Mistry, who gained 10 nominations for his novel Family Matters.

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk won last year's prize

The Impac, a contest run by Dublin City Public Libraries in its ninth year, is awarded for a single work of fiction in the English language.

It honours novels from around the world and in translation. To date, four out of eight winners have been translated works - including last year's My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

The judges are novelist Anita Desai, writer and academic Shirley Goek-Lin Lim, broadcaster and writer John Quinn, poet and publisher Knut Odegard, and author Michele Roberts.

The shortlist will be announced in March 2004, and the winner revealed three months later.

Previous winners include French writer Michel Houellebecq, Canadian Alistair MacLeod and English authors Nicola Barker and Andrew Miller.