Authors Haruki Murakami and Michel Houellebecq head the list of 10 novelists shortlisted for this year's prestigious Impac Award.

Authors Haruki Murakami and Michel Houellebecq are currently heading the list of 10 novelists shortlisted for this year's prestigious Impac Award which is worth approximately $131,000. While Murakami has been nominated for his surreal love story "1Q84", author Houellebecq has been nominated for the award owing to his novel "The Map and the Territory", which features the "celebrated novelist Michel Houellebecq" as a fictional character.

This year's line-up features the highest ever number of translated works, with Murakami and Houellebecq up against Icelandic star Sjón's "From the Mouth of the Whale", Dutch author Tommy Wieringa's "tale of a lonely musical prodigy Caesarion", and Norwegian debut novelist Kjersti Skomsvold's "The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am."

They will be competing with the Costa-winning UK author Andrew Miller's "Pure," Irish writer Kevin Barry's dystopian "City of Bohane", Julie Otsuka's "The Buddha in the Attic," Arthur Phillips' "The Tragedy of Arthur," starring the novelist Arthur Phillips, and Karen Russell's alligator-wrestling theme park-set "Swamplandia!"

"This is the highest number of books in translation on the shortlist since the award began," said Dublin city librarian Margaret Hayes, "and it is wonderful to have novels from Japan and Iceland as well as France, the Netherlands and Norway. The list also includes novels from the USA, the UK and Ireland. There is something here for everyone and I urge readers to get stuck in and enjoy the humor and sadness, history and fantasy, teenage and elderly angst on this year's shortlist."