“Lost Children Archive” by Valeria Luiselli is the winner of this year’s Dublin Literary Award

Novel,”Lost Children Archive” which weaves together the stories of Mexican migrants with those of a US family on a road trip south, by Valeria Luiselli wins €100,000 Dublin literary award ,and is the largest prize for a single novel published in English.

Lost Children Archive tells the story of a couple, both sound artists, who set off with their two children on a road trip through America. As the family heads west, they listen on the news to stories of other children, immigrants who are detained while trying to cross the border in the US.The Dublin Literary Award described the book as ‘timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious and formally inventive – a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world’.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and now lives in New York. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and non fiction, she is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize.

Lost Children Archive which won the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize is her first novel written in English. She lives in New York City.

The Dublin Literary Award receives its nominations from public libraries in cities across the globe and recognises both writers and translators.The winner was announced today at an online event as part of the International Literature Festival Dublin.The award was presented by Colm Tóibín, a previous winner of the prize at the Irish Consulate in New York City.

Accepting the award , winner Valeria Luiselli said : ‘I can say, without a hint of doubt, that without books – without sharing in the company of other writers’ human experiences – we would not have made it through these months

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