We are delighted that Graeme Macrae Burnet’s highly acclaimed novel CASE STUDY has been longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award. This follows a whole raft of nominations and accolades last year including the 2022 Booker Prize longlist, the shortlists for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize and 2022 Ned Kelly Award and the ‘Best of 2022’ lists for The Times and The New York Times – and more!
The Dublin Literary Award is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English, with a prize of €100,000 for the winner. Its aim is to promote excellence in world literature and its longlist is decided by libraries throughout the world, with titles nominated on the basis of ‘high literary merit’. There are seventy titles on this year’s longlist with titles such as YOUNG MUNGO by Douglas Stuart and BURNTCOAT by Sarah Hall being included. You can see the full longlist here.
Speaking at the launch of the longlist, Lord Mayor of Dublin Cllr. Caroline Conroy said ‘This year’s Dublin Literary Award longlist is a fascinating chain of stories unifying readers across cultures and countries, more relevant now than ever before. I encourage you to drop into your local library to explore the list over the next few months, it not only rewards the reader but also has the power to transform you too.’
The shortlist will be revealed on 28 March and the winner announced on 25 May as part of the International Literature Festival of Dublin.
CASE STUDY was published to great acclaim in 2021 by Saraband Books in the UK, with audio rights going to Bolinda. To date, translation rights have been sold in 18 countries, with Text publishing in Australia and Biblioasis in North America.
Through a series of notebooks, CASE STUDY follows the story of a young woman who, convinced that the psychotherapist Arthur Collins Braithwaite is responsible for her sister's suicide, assumes a fake identity and presents herself to him as a patient so she can find out the truth about her sister. What ensues is a thrilling game of cat and mouse between therapist and patient, as well as writer and reader.
Written using Burnet’s distinctive flair for character and plot, this dazzling, dizzying novel is an extraordinary mediation on sanity, identity and truth itself.
About Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet was brought up Kilmarnock, Ayrshire and now lives in Glasgow. He has also lived in the Czech Republic, France, Portugal and London. He has appeared at festivals and events in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Russia, Estonia, Macau, Ireland, Germany and France, as well as in the UK. He has also been shortlisted for many European and American literary awards.
His first novel, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ADÈLE BEDEAU (Contraband, 2014), received a New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust and was longlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award. A second Inspector Gorski novel, THE ACCIDENT ON THE A35, was published in 2017, the year he won Author of the Year for the Sunday Herald Culture Awards.
HIS BLOODY PROJECT (Contraband, 2015) won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Awards. It has been published to great acclaim around the world and film rights have been optioned by Synchronicity.
Praise for CASE STUDY
‘CASE STUDY by Graeme Macrae Burnet is complex, funny and scary. After the ingenuity of HIS BLOODY PROJECT, set in remote 19th-century Scotland, who would imagine he could pull off the same trick twice with the cultish anti-psychiatry scene of 1960s London? Mind-blowing.’ – Peter Brookes, The Times, ‘Favourite Books of 2022’
‘Did an unorthodox therapist drive a woman to suicide? This novel of purportedly found documents, including journals and biographical interludes, takes on this psychological mystery while exploring through its nested narratives the possibilities of fiction.’ – New York Times, ‘Notable Books of 2022’
‘A novel of mind-bending brilliance. Graeme Macrae Burnet is a master of muddying the waters, of troubling ideas of truth and identity, fiction and documentary, and CASE STUDY shows him at the height of his powers.’ – Hannah Kent
‘A thrilling investigation into sanity and identity.’ – Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller
‘CASE STUDY is above all a very funny book, a wry look back at 60s counterculture in which Burnet’s inventions rub shoulders with real personalities… If Burnet’s aim in writing CASE STUDY was to force us up against the contradictions of our conflicted selves, he has surely succeeded. This is a novel that is entertaining and mindfully engrossing in equal measure.’ – Nina Allan, Guardian, ‘Book of the Day'