Michael Crummey’s The Adversary has won the 2025 Dublin Literary Award.

May 22, 2025, 2:09pm

Today, Canadian writer Michael Crummey’s “dark, enthralling novel about love and its limitations” was announced as the winner of this year’s Dublin Literary Award. Selected from a shortlist of six novels, The Adversary took home the top prize.

The Dublin Literary Award only accepts nominations from public libraries: authors, agents, and publishers can disqualify their books if they try to get involved. Crummey was nominated by the Canadian Newfoundland and Labrador libraries, and sweetly thanked them in his acceptance speech:

I would not be here today without the Buchans Public Library, the library in my hometown. It’s like a small mining town, maybe 1,500 people down 70km of a dead end road. But the library was the place where I found the world outside my town, and it just gave me such a sense of possibility.

Sponsored by the Dublin City Council, the Dublin Literary Award has been around for 30 years. With a prize of €100,000, it’s the highest paying annual award for a single book in English.

The Adversary is set in remote Newfoundland, and follows the aftermath of a wedding gone awry, which kicks off “a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar’s largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world.”

Crummey joins recent winners Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter; Katja Oskamp’s Marzahn, Mon Amour, translated by Jo Heinrich; Alice Zeniter’s The Art of Losing, translated by Frank Wynne; Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive; and Anna Burns’ Milkman.

One great short story to read today: Osmamu Dazai’s “Shame”

By James Folta

May 22, 2025, 9:30am

According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:

Osmamu Dazai, “Shame”

There’s nothing better than a story that starts with “Oh my god, I’ve done something horrible.” You know you’re in for a fun one. This piece by Osmamu Dazai starts with just such a regretful bang, and turns into a combination of “The Purloined Letter,” British farce, and Kristen Arnett’s “Am I The Literary Asshole.”

There’s a lot of shame sloshing around this story, fittingly, but Dazai puts his finger on two very specific fears of mine: giving another writer a terrible note, and looking like a fool in front of someone you admire.

I’m not really making the sale here, but trust me, you’re going to enjoy this story. Just know there’s a reason it’s called “Shame.”

The story begins:

Kikuko, I’ve shamed myself. I’ve shamed myself terribly. To say it feels like my face is on fire, is not enough. To say I want to roll in a meadow screaming my lungs out, doesn’t do this feeling justice. Listen to this verse from 2 Samuel in the Bible: “And Tamar put ashes on her head, and rent her garment of divers colours that was on her, and laid her hand on her head, and went on crying.” Poor Tamar. When a young woman is shamed beyond all redemption, dumping ashes on her head and crying her eyes out is a proper response. I know just how she felt.

Kikuko. It’s exactly as you said: novelists are human trash. No, they’re worse than that; they’re demons. Horrible people. Oh, the shame I brought on myself! Kikuko. I kept it secret from you, but I’ve been writing letters to Toda-san. Yes, yes, the novelist. And then, eventually, I met him, only to bring this horrible shame upon myself. It’s so insane.

Read it here.

*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).

National Short Story Month one great short story Osmamu Dazai short stories

The winners of the 2025 International Booker Prize are breaking boundaries.

By Brittany Allen

May 22, 2025, 9:28am

The winners of this year’s International Booker Prize were announced this Tuesday. Congratulations are in order to Banu Mushtaq, author of Heart Lamp, and Deepa Bhashti, who translated the winning collection.

This is the first time in International Booker history that a book of stories has received the top prize. It’s also the first time that a book translated from the Kannada has been recognized.

Heart Lamp was cited for its nuanced engagement with the lives of Muslim girls and women living in and around oppressive communities. The twelve pieces in the book were written over more than a dozen years. In a considered review of the collection for Himal, the writer Meghna Rao contextualized Mushtaq’s work in a richly rebellious literary tradition.

Her stories have been variously praised as frank, heart-wrenching, and emotionally intense. Which all chimes with the author’s credentials.

Mushtaq is an activist as well as a writer, and practiced law for many years. She told the Booker committee her stories are often inspired by personal interactions. Though as she notes in the collection’s epilogue, the book has a diasporic consciousness.

Mushtaq “does not see herself writing only about a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain community…The particulars may be different, but at the core is a resistance to being controlled, ‘tamed’, or disallowed the exploration of our full potential.”

The International Booker is a unique prize for being split. Half of the 50,000 pound award goes to a book’s author, and half to its translator. Bhashti, an international writer who’s previously translated books by Kodagina Gouramma and Kota Shivarama Karanth, describes her approach to translation as an “instinctive practice.”

The novelist Max Porter, chair of this year’s judging panel, announced the selection Tuesday evening, from a shortlist of six other titles.

Glasses were raised at the Tate Modern.

And Other Stories Bandaya Deepa Bhasthi Heart Lamp International Booker Prize literary prizes literature in translation Max Porter Meghna Rao

Nam Le has won Australia’s oldest literary award for the second time.

By Dan Sheehan

May 21, 2025, 1:46pm

Sixteen years after bursting onto the literary scene with his debut short story collection, The Boat (which won, or was nominated for, pretty much every major book prize in Australia), Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le’s first book of poetry has earned its author his second Book of the Year award at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Nam Le won the top prize at this year’s NSW Literary Awards on Monday night for his book-length poem 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, an exploration of family, racism, war, trauma, and the Vietnamese diaspora which the judges praised for its “poetic brilliance, power and accessibility.”

Le also won the $30,000 NSW multicultural award category, but lost the Kenneth Slessor prize for poetry to Lebanese-Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani and his acclaimed debut rock flight.

Nam Le came to Australia from Vietnam as a boat refugee in the late 1970s, when he was just a year old, and originally worked as lawyer before turning to writing full time.

With a total purse of $360,000, the NSW Literary Awards are considered Australia’s oldest and richest state-based literary prizes.

Other winners in this year’s NSW Literary Awards included Fiona McFarlane for her book Highway 13, which won The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000); James Bradley for Deep Water, a look at the oceans and the part they play in nature, history and climate, which won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000); and Katrina Nannestad for Silver Linings, which received the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000).

Australian literature Nam Le NSA Literary Awards poetry Vietnamese diaspora

Here are the CLMP’s 2025 Firecracker Awards finalists.

By Literary Hub

May 21, 2025, 10:27am

Today, the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) announced the finalists for its eleventh annual Firecracker Awards, which celebrate “the best independently published books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry and the best literary magazines in the categories of debut and general excellence.”

Winners in the books categories will receive $2,000, to be split between the press and the author or translator, and winner in magazine categories will receive $1,000. Winners will be announced June 26, 2025. In the meantime, here are the finalists:

FICTION
Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento, published by University of Pittsburgh Press
The World With Its Mouth Open by Zahid Rafiq, published by Tin House
Vague Predictions & Prophecies by Daisuke Shen, published by CLASH Books
Medusa of the Roses by Navid Sinaki, published by Grove Atlantic
Amphibian by Tyler Wetherall, published by Ig Publishing