Crowd of contenders jostle for Impac prize
Michelle Pauli writing in The Guardian overnight

The 2008 International Impac Dublin award longlist may be one title shorter than last year but it remains a monster. Covering the authorial alphabet from Adichie to Zaharieva, an astonishing 137 titles are battling it out for the richest literary prize in the world - with nominations from 161 libraries in 121 cities worldwide.

The big hitters are present and correct - Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Peter Carey, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon - as are prize-winners of other recent awards, includings Kiran Desai (last year's Booker), Lloyd Jones (Commonwealth prize for his Booker-shortlisted Mr Pip), and previous Impac title-holders such as Tahar Ben Jelloun (the 2004 winner).
The award is equally profligate in terms of the genres it covers. Although the titles will eventually be whittled down to a shortlist (a maximum of 10 books - still generous for a shortlist) composed almost entirely of literary fiction, at this stage all styles get their moment in the Impac spotlight. So we get everything from crime fiction - Harlan Coban's Promise Me is in the running - to chick lit, with the Richard and Judy-approved My Best Friend's Girl by Dorothy Koomson.

At this stage, then, the award can be little more than a numbers game: the longlist for the hefty €100,000 (nearly £70,000) prize spans 45 countries and 15 languages, with 27 of the titles in translation. As to which will make it on to the shortlist, few clues are dropped as the number of nominations each book receives from the participating libraries is not necessarily taken into account by the judges.

Nonetheless, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Biafra tale Half of a Yellow Sun, has garnered a good number of nominations and also has form, having won the Orange prize earlier this year. Similarly, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss has achieved an impressive spread of support - with libraries in the US, Scandinavia, South America, eastern Europe and Africa nominating her Kalimpong-set story. Despite only getting support from Finland's Helsinki library, Spain's Javier Cercas is also likely to be a frontrunner with The Speed of Light, his metafictional account of a novelist grappling with the story of a Vietnam veteran.
Cormac McCarthy, already in possession of the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black for The Road, his bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic America, is also a good bet to make it to the next stage. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who wins support from libraries as far afield as Russia, South Africa, Ireland and the Gambia, should also be in with a shout. The Kenyan author's contender is Wizard of the Crow, a novel which is, he says, an attempt "to sum up Africa of the 20th century in the context of 2,000 years of world history".

However, part of the fun of this list is finding out where UK writers have their fans abroad. Martin Amis's House of Meetings gets one nomination - from Warsaw Public Library. Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother, his follow-up to the phenomenally successful The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, gets the seal of approval from Belgium's Ghent library. Robert Harris's Imperium, about the treacherous world of ancient Roman politics is popular with library-goers in Bloemfontein, South Africa while Stef Penney's Costa-winning The Company of Wolves, about prospecting in 1860s Canada, strikes a chord in Poland and Australia. Diane Setterfield's gothic suspense novel The Thirteenth Tale, which hit the headlines for securing its first-time author an astounding £800,000 advance, is big in Uganda and Sweden.

Aside from its remarkable diversity and considerable coffers, the Impac also stands out from the crowd for its long lead-time. Books first published in English between January and December 2005, or first published in a language other than English between January 2001 and December 2005, are eligible for consideration.

This means that books which have already done the round of literary prizes (such as David Mitchell's Black Swan Green and Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children) have a final chance to pick up a gong, while books which may have drifted from public consciousness (Sarah Waters's Night Watch, Dave Eggers's What is the What) are granted a second wave of publicity. The shortlist and the winner are chosen by an international panel of judges. This year's panel includes the writers Helon Habila, Aamer Hussein, Patricia Duncker and Jose Luis de Juan.
They will announce the shortlist on April 2 2008 and the winner on June 12 2008.

The longlist in full can be seen here.