Montreal's Rawi Hage nominated for IMPAC Dublin Award

Montreal writer Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game is on the short list for the IMPAC Dublin Award, one of the world's most lucrative literary prizes.

Hage'sis one of eight books by writers from Spain, Australia, Sri Lanka and other countries nominated for $160,000 CDNaward.

Hage, a Lebanese-Canadian, writes about a friendship between two young men during Lebanon's civil war in the debut novel.

The book wasnominated in Canada for the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, and won two Quebec literary awards.

Winnipeg's library system nominated De Niro's Game for the IMPAC Dublin Award, which invites nominations for English-language books from libraries around the world.

TwelveCanadian authors were on the long list for the 2008 prize, including Margaret Atwood for Moral Disorder and Heather O'Neill for Lullabies for Little Criminals.

Prominent books including Kiran Desai's Booker winner The Inheritance of Loss and Philip Roth's Everyman were overlooked in the IMPAC short list.

Other nominees are:

• The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas of Spain.
• The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne of Sri Lanka.
• Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones of Australia.
• Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua of Israel.
• The Attack by Yasmina Khadra of Algeria.
• The Woman who Waited by Andrei Makine of Russia.
• Winterwood by Patrick McCabe of Ireland.

The booksby Cercas, Kashua, Khadra and Makine are in translation.

The winner will be announced June 12 in Dublin.