2009 Longlist | 2008 Winner | 2008 Shorts | 2007 | 1996-2006
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (official site) is the largest and most international prize of its kind. It involves libraries from all corners of the globe, and is open to books written in any language. The Book Award, an initiative of Dublin City Council, is a partnership between Dublin City Council, the Municipal Government of Dublin City, and IMPAC, a productivity improvement company which operates in over 50 countries. The Award is administered by Dublin City Public Libraries
The prize is €100,000 which is awarded to the author if the book is written in English. If the winning book is in English translation, the author receives €75,000 and the translator, €25,000. The winner also receives a trophy which is sponsored by Waterford Crystal. The 2008 will be given for a book published in 2006. This delay gives an opportunity for the consultative process to work well .Recent winners include notables such as; Colm Tóibín, Orhan Pamuk, Nicola Barker, David Malouf and Herta Muller amongst others.
2010 Winner & Shortlists
Winner: The Twin
Other short listed titles:
The Elegance of the Hedgehog 
In Zodiac Light
Settlement
The Believers
Netherland 
God’s Own Country
Home 
2009 Winner
U.S. author Michael Thomas has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel, collecting 100,000 euros in what is billed as the world’s richest prize for a single work of fiction.
Thom
as was honored at a reception at Dublin’s Mansion House for Man Gone Down, about a once-promising Harvard student who is now broke and trying to raise money to keep his family together.
Man Gone Down by Micheal Thomas (American) Grove / Atlantic
This book is an extraordinary debut that tackles race, wealth and family head on as a young black man finds the American Dream dissolving around him. On the eve of this thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of "Man Gone Down" finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them to live in. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we discover a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.
2009 Other Shortlisted - Winner June 11th-
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Dominican / American) Riverhead Books
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight, and keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku ...
Ravel by Jean Echenoz (French) in translation. The New Press
A bestseller in France, Ravel is a beguiling and original evocation of the last ten years in the life of the musical genius Ravel, written by the novelist Jean Echenoz. The book opens in 1927 as Maurice Ravel - dandy, eccentric, and curmudgeon ...
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Pakistani / British) Hamish Hamilton / Harcourt / Doubleday
In the wake of September 11, Changez, a Pakistani man in Manhattan, finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.
The Archivist's Story by Travis Holland (American) Dial PressThe Shadow of the Wind meets Gorky Park in this powerful, haunting debut It is Moscow, in 1939. The great authorIsaac Babel is spending his last days in the infamous Lubyanka prison, forbidden to write. His final works have been consigned to the...
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The Burnt-out Town of Miracles by Roy Jacobsen (Norwegian) in translation. John Murray Publishers
Set in Finland in 1939, this is the story of one man who remains in his home town when everyone else has fled, burning down their houses in their wake, before the invading Russians arrive. Timo remains behind because he can't imagine life anywhere else, doing anything else besides felling the trees near his home. This is a novel about belonging - a tale of powerful and forbidden friendships forged during a war, of unexpected bravery and astonishing survival instincts.
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt (American) Bloomsbury Publishing
Based on the true story of the strange relationship between a British mathematician and an unknown mathematical genius, and populated with such luminaries as D H Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, this text fashions from this period a story about the fragility of human connection and our need to find order in the world.
Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Indian / British) Simon & Schuster
An Indian Cyrano de Bergerac, about the relationship between an extraordinary street boy and the enemy who came to help. Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when...
Longlist ull List of Nominated titles - Nominating Libraries - Commentary on Longlist Award Tragic Blog -
2008 Rawi Hage Wins EU100,000 Irish Literary Award
Nominated by Winnipeg Public Library, Canada
June 12 (Bloomberg) -- Lebanese author Rawi Hage {right}won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 
collecting 100,000 euros ($154,000) in what is billed as the world's richest prize for a single work of fiction.
Hage was honored during a ceremony in Dublin City Hall for De Niro's Game
The book overcame competition from seven other better-known finalists, including Patrick McCabe's ``Winterwood'' and Yasmina Khadra's ``The Attack.''
``I am a fortunate man,'' Hage said at the ceremony. ``After a long journey of war, displacement and separation, I feel that I am one of the few wanderers who is privileged enough to have been rewarded,'' said Hage, who was born in Beirut and lived through nine years of civil war before emigrating to Canada.
The judges described De Niro's Game ' as ``an eloquent, forthright and at times beautifully written first novel.''
``Ringing with insight and authenticity, the novel shows how war can envelop lives,'' the panel said in a statement. ``It's a game where there are no winners, just degrees of survival.''
The 2008 IMPC Dublin Literary Award Short List
** De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage- Winner
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The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas
An aspiring young writer from Spain begins work as a teaching assistant on a Midwestern campus and finds himselfsharing an office with Rodney Falk, a taciturn Vietnam veteran of strange ways and few friends. But when Rodney suddenly disappears...
* The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne-
This autobiographical novel is old-fashioned story-telling at its very best - indeed the reader feels utterly bereft once the novel is finished. 'Loyalty (and the damnable lack of it in his wife) was the thought uppermost in the mind of Sir Andrew...
* Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones-
Alice is entranced by the aesthetics of technology and, in every aeroplane flight, every Xerox machine, every neon sign, sees the poetry of modernity. Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of the atomic bomb, is an expert on Alexander Graham Bell.
* Let It Be Morning: A Novel by Sayed Kashua-
A young journalist, recently married, is seeking a quieter life away from the city. Suddenly, the village becomes a pawn in the power struggles of the Middle East. As the situation grows increasingly dire, paranoia begins to threaten the...
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*The Attack by Yasmina Khadra-
Ammine, a surgeon in a Jerusalem hospital, struggles to cope with the bodies of victims of a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem restaurant. When the police pin responsibility of the suicide attack on Ammine's wife, he is at first baffled and angry.
* The Woman Who Waited by Andrei Makine-
The compelling, brilliant new novel from a master of European literature, a bestseller in France When a young, rebellious writer from Leningrad arrives in a remote Russian village to study local customs, one woman stands out: Vera, who has been...
* Winterwood by Patrick McCabe -
Married to the sugar-lipped Catherine and sharing his daughter Immy's passion for the enchanted kingdom of winterwood, Redmond Hatch was happy. But then infidelity, betrayal and the 'scary things' from which he would protect his daughter steal...
2007 Winner & Shortlist-
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Winner : Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson - In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events - the accidental death of a child, his best friend's feelings of guilt and eventual disappearance, his father's decision to leave the family for another...
Reviews:
"This stunning novel will tell you more about the Norwegian countryside and psyche than the most enthusiastically well-informed guidebook."-"Sunday Telegraph" "[Petterson] captures the essence of a man's vast existence with a clean-lined freshness that hits you like a burst of winter air - surprising and breathtaking."-"Daily Express" ." . . a true gem, compact yet radiant."-"Independent on Sunday" ." . . a minor masterpiece of death and delusion."-"The Guardian"
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
A novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race; about what we think, what we believe, and what we know. Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th-century Britain...
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
Leaving Dublin to fight for the Allied cause as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Willie Dunne finds himself caught between the war playing out on foreign fields and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising.
Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee
Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named...
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed...
The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs
Charles Wenmoth is a blacksmith and Methodist lay-preacher in South-West England. In his relationship with Harriet French, a blind girl who maintains her belief despite her debilitating condition, Wenmoth finds his fragile faith tested in the most...
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Llewlyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, finds bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice - leave the scene as he found it, or cut the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows...
Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
Maximilian Ophuls is knifed to death on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter India, slaughtered by his Kashmiri driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar, the Clown. This book presents the story of Max, his killer, and his daughter - and of a fourth character, the woman who links them all.
Past Winners of Dublin Literary Prize
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2006 The Master by Colm Tóibín- It is January 1895 and Henry James's play, Guy Domville, from which he hoped to make his fortune, has failed on the London stage. Opening with this disaster, The Master spans the next five years of James's life, during which time he moves to Rye...
2005 The Known World by Edward P Jones.
This is a Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. It explores race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature. Masterful, Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about the...
2004 This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun
'a sad and splendid book' New York Times Book Review In this extraordinary non-fiction novel, based on a true story, Tahar Ben Jelloun traces the experiences of Salim who, in 1971, took part in a failed coup attempt to oust King Hassan II of Morocco.
2003 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
In Istanbul, in the late 1590s, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and his empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day - in the European manner. But when one of the miniaturists goes missing and is...
2002 Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. This is the story of two brothers, but the subject of the novel is in its dismantling of society and its assumptions, a dissection of modern lives and loves. Half...
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2001 No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
Alexander MacDonald tells the story of his family from the vantage point of the 1980s. In 1779, driven from his home, Calum MacDonald sets sail from the Scottish Highlands for Canada. Reaching "the land of trees", he settles his extensive family...
2000 Wide Open by Nicola Barker
A novel about stripping off layers of prejudice and lies, about the possibility of redemption, and laying bare the truth. It is also about coming to terms with the past, and about the fantasies people construct in order to protect their fragile...
1999 Ingenious Pain by Andrew Miller
At the dawn of the Enlightenment, James Dyer is born unable to feel pain. A source of wonder and scientific curiosity as a child, he rises through the ranks of Georgian society to become a brilliant surgeon. Yet as a human being he fails...
1998 The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller
Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign of terror, this novel tells the story of a group of young students, each of whom has left the impoverished provinces in search of better prospects in the city.
1997 A Heart So White by Javier Marias
Juan knows little about his widowed father Ranz, a man with a troubled past. The unspoken dialogue between father and son, however, becomes a spelling-out of the horrifying truth once Juan has been married for a year to Luisa and she turns...
1996 Remembering Babylon by David Malouf
A picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focused on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals. It is essentially the story of a boy caught between both worlds. David Malouf, himself an Australian...
