Luiselli’s prize-winning novel responds to migratory crisis

The 100,000-euro ($122,000) award, sponsored by Dublin City Council, is the top monetary prize for a single novel published in English. The finalists are nominated by libraries around the world.

“That really seems to me to be the most beautiful thing about this award,” Luiselli said in a recent interview with The Associated Press from New York, where she lives. “It is a prize that is not linked, like all other prizes, to the speed of the market, but to the speed of reading.”

Published in 2019, “Lost Children Archive” addresses the issue of migrant children traveling unaccompanied to the United States, something that the author has witnessed first-hand as a translator and interpreter for children at the immigration court of New York.

In the novel, a family made up of a couple of sound documentary creators and their children set out on a road trip from New York to the southern border, something Luiselli did in 2014. This and other trips gave rise to her story about displaced children that is intertwined with the domination and elimination of the Apache culture.

“Crossing this country a different urgency took hold of me, the urgency to write about political violence towards the communities that this country considers outsiders,” Luiselli explained. “Thinking about the cycles that are repeated in the history of violence against certain communities, almost always violence motivated by the deep racism in this country, traveling and touring this country and seeing that, I decided to write ‘Lost Children Archive.’”