Booker winners head award list

DBC Pierre won the 2003 Booker Prize for Vernon God Little

Booker winners DBC Pierre and Margaret Atwood are among the authors on this year's Impac Award longlist.

Almost 150 novels chosen by 185 libraries around the world are in the running for the £70,000 prize.

Mark Haddon's Whitbread winner The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time gained the most nominations, followed by Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

The shortlist is being announced next March, and the winner will be unveiled at a ceremony in Dublin next June.

DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, which scooped the Booker Prize in 2003, was highly rated by the libraries from 51 countries.

Patron

The Impac Award, which has the Irish capital's Lord Mayor as its patron, is open to both novels written in the English language and those in translation.

Mark Haddon's Whitbread winner gained the most nominations

This year's longlist features 29 titles originally written in 15 different languages.

Five out of the nine winners to date have been novels translated into English.

Anita Shreve, JM Cotezee, Rose Tremain and Paulo Coelho are also featured on this year's longlist.

International best-seller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is in the running as well.

The judging panel for this year's award comprises of Jonathan Buckley, Agnes Desarthe, Rita-Ann Higgins, Nino Ricci, Milan Richter, and Eugene R.Sullivan.

Last year's recipent of the Impac Award was Moroccan-born writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, with the translation of his book The Blinding Absence of Light.