International Impac Dublin Literary Award
Novel
1996 Remembering Babylon by David Malouf
A runner-up for the Booker Prize, this novel is about a 13-year-old British cabin boy named Gemmy who is set ashore in Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later, he runs across European settlers, who find him both fascinating and repellent. "Remembering Babylon" concerns Gemmy's own sense of self, his knowledge of the aborigines, and how both he and they are perceived by the Europeans.
1997 A Heart So White by Javier Marias, Margaret Jull Costa
Before marrying Juan's mother, Juan's father Ranz had been married to her sister--for a few days. Shortly after their honeymoon, the woman committed suicide. Ranz is traumatized by this to such a degree that his personality becomes quite menacing; Juan and his new wife Luisa, translators for diplomats, try to come to grips with the past of Juan's family and how it affects the future of their own marriage.
1998 The Land of Green Plums by Michael Hofmann, Herta Muller
2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller's autobiographical novel follows the fates of five college friends in Romania who are scattered across the country by state-assigned jobs following their graduation. The unnamed female narrator is, like Müller, a German minority, who struggles to maintain contact with her supportive core of friends, despite constant government supervision. The narrator's life is further complicated when she befriends the daughter of a local Party member against her better judgment. As the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu begins to crumble, the state attempts to tighten its grip on the populace, with disastrous results for the protagonist. Müller dedicated the novel to all of her friends who died at the hands of the Romanian Communist Party.
1999 Ingenious Pain by Andrew Miller
A novel set in the 18th century, about a boy who cannot feel pain--and therefore cannot imagine the pain of others. He begins his career as a freak in a carnival, but eventually becomes a successful physician. It is not until he falls in love, on a visit to Russia, that he begins to understand what pain, and also sympathy, is.
2000 Wide Open by Nicola Barker
The characters in this novel include a weed killer, a photographer of pornography, a wild-boar farmer, and a hemophiliac adolescent.
2001 No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
This lyrical novel is narrated by Alexander MacDonald, an orthodontist in Canada, who recalls his family history, beginning with their emigration from Scotland in the 17th century and ending with Alexander's sometimes tortured relationships with his coal-mining brothers in modern-day Toronto. A New York Times Notable Book for the year 2000.