Marian Keyes and Cecelia Ahern are already going head to head in the Sainsbury’s Popular Fiction Award category at this week’s Nibbies, but they’re now both shortlisted for the equivalent prize in their native Ireland, the Easons Irish Popular Fiction Book of the Year.
Several other authors are also in with a chance of a double win. The Tubridy Show Listeners’ Choice Book of the Year shortlists Sebastian Barry and Aravind Adiga, who are competing for the Border’s Author of the Year Nibbie, as well as Kate Summerscale and Joseph O’Neill, whose latest books are both candidates for the Richard & Judy Best Read. (And the fifth of the six is Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, a Richard & Judy pick last summer).
You can register your votes on the Irish Book Awards website until 1st May; the awards will be made on 6th May.
Keyes won the Nibbie for Popular Fiction just two years ago, for her previous book, Anybody Out There?, in the category’s second year of existence. The inaugural winner was Audrey Niffeneger for The Time Traveller’s Wife; last year the Nibbie was taken home by Kim Edwards for her debut novel, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.
Curiously, this means that this award is yet to be won by a British author, although the presence of Sebastian Faulks, Bernard Cornwell or Sadie Jones on the shortlist means an even chance that the sequence will be broken.
The Irish fiction market has long been a source of bestselling writers whom British readers have quickly taken to their hearts. Maeve Bunchy, Cathy Kelly and Patricia Scanlan are among the better-known names, but newer writers such as Anna McPartlin, Tana French and Melissa Hill help ensure that British readers’ apparently insatiable appetite does not go unsatisfied.
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