The Dublin Literary Award has announced its 2026 nominations, and two African novels have made the cut: Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Creation of Half-Broken People and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count. The award, worth €100,000 to the winner, stands as the world’s most valuable prize for a single work of fiction and recognizes both authors and translators. If the winning book is a translation, the author receives €75,000 while the translator takes home €25,000.

Established in 1994 and sponsored by Dublin City Council, the award promotes excellence in world literature through nominations from public libraries around the globe. This year, 69 titles from 36 countries were nominated by 80 libraries, representing the best fiction from Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Adichie’s Dream Count received three nominations from Almeida Garrett Municipal Library in Portugal, Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, while Ndlovu’s The Creation of Half-Broken People was nominated by the City of Cape Town Library & Information Services in South Africa. The list includes 20 debut authors and 30 translated titles in 17 languages. Among the judges is Nigerian performance poet and cultural administrator Dike Chukwumerije, joining an international panel that includes novelist Xiaolu Guo, former Irish Ambassador Daniel Mulhall, translator Clara Ministral, and author Disha Bose. Professor Chris Morash serves as non-voting chairperson.

Ndlovu’s The Creation of Half-Broken People is the Zimbabwean writer’s fourth novel, following her acclaimed trilogy beginning with The Theory of Flight. The book is an African Gothic that follows a nameless woman working at the Good Foundation museum, filled with artifacts from the family’s colonial exploits in Africa. The Good family descends from Captain John Good of King Solomon’s Mines fame, and when protesters appear outside the museum led by an ancient woman who isn’t real, the narrator’s past returns to haunt her. Living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, she experiences visions of women whose stories have been obscured by colonialism and patriarchy. A 2022 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient, Ndlovu returned to Bulawayo after nearly two decades in North America to write what Publishers Weekly called “a revelation.”

Adichie’s Dream Count, her first novel in twelve years, arrives as a New York Times bestseller and has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and nominated as a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. The novel follows four women whose lives intersect: Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer stranded in America during the pandemic who grapples with past lovers and regrets; Zikora, her lawyer best friend dealing with betrayal and heartbreak; Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold cousin questioning how well she knows herself; and Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper facing an unthinkable hardship that threatens everything she’s built. Set between the US and Nigeria, the novel explores the immigrant experience, tensions between Africans and African Americans, mother-daughter relationships, friendship, and the pressure on women to marry and have children. Critics have praised Adichie’s ability to render each woman’s story in a distinctive voice, with The New York Times calling it “dreamy indeed” and The Washington Post noting that “Dream Count compels us to acknowledge, once again, that no story is ever just a single story.”

The longlist of up to 20 titles will be announced on February 17, 2026, with the shortlist of six titles revealed on April 7, 2026. The winner will be announced on May 21, 2026, during a ceremony at the International Literature Festival Dublin.