‘Solenoid’ wins 2024 Dublin Literary Award

Solenoid by Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu (Deep Vellum Publishing), translated by US translator Sean Cotter, has won the €100,000 (A$163,706) international Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction written in or translated into English.

Based on Cărtărescu’s own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid combines fiction with autobiography and history and is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s communist Romania. It begins with the mundane details of a diarist’s life before moving into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics.

Said the judges: ‘The city of Bucharest, in which the narrator is a teacher and failed writer, is a place in which what appears to be an abandoned factory contains unexpected caverns, tunnels and a gallery of enormous parasites, where an apparently ordinary, run-down house is built upon an electrical device that causes people lying in bed to float. By turns wildly inventive, philosophical, and lyrical, with passages of great beauty, Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little known to English-language readers. Sean Cotter’s translation of the novel sets out to change that situation, capturing the lyrical precision of the original, thereby opening up Cărtărescu’s work to an entirely new readership.’

The winning novel was chosen from a shortlist of six that also included Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (Giramondo). Cărtărescu receives €75,000, while Cotter receives €25,000.

Category: International awards International news