Valeria Luiselli has won the 2021 Dublin Literary Award for her novel Lost Children Archive.
Luiselli’s 2019 book follows a family on a road trip from New York to the American southwest, where they witness the plight of migrants trying to make it to the United States. A reviewer for Kirkus called the novel, which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, “a powerful border story, at once intellectual and heartfelt.”
“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,” Luiselli said. “If our spirits have found renewal, if we have found strength to carry on, if we have maintained a sense of enthusiasm for life, it is thanks to the worlds that books have given us.”
The Dublin Literary Award, established in 1996, is given annually to a novel written in, or translated into, English. It’s administered by the Dublin City Libraries, and comes with a cash prize of about $122,000, making it one of the most lucrative literary awards in the world.
Colm Tóibín, who won the prize in 2006 for The Master, praised Luiselli, saying the author “has written a novel in which stories spiral. She has rendered her characters with astonishing grace and insight, and through them she has drawn a picture of what they have been driving towards throughout the book, the contested place, where the old rules do not apply, for which a new form of archive is needed.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
