Reading List · Literary Prizes
No publisher can enter a book for this prize. The nominations come from public libraries around the world, and the winner gets €100,000. It has been given in Dublin every year since 1996, to novels written in English and to novels translated into it; when a translation wins, the translator gets a quarter. Thirty-one winners so far, twelve of them translated, one of them from Dutch.
By Lisanne Swart · 31 winners since 1996 · Nominated by libraries · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 22 September 2026
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Libraries are nominating books for 2027: novels first published in English, or in English translation, between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2026. In recent years the longlist has come in February, the shortlist in April and the winner in May, at the International Literature Festival Dublin; the 2027 dates are not out yet.
Quick answer
The Dublin Literary Award is an Irish prize for a novel written in English or translated into English, worth €100,000. Books cannot be entered by publishers: they are nominated by public libraries around the world. It was first given in 1996, as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and is now funded by Dublin City Council and run by Dublin City Libraries. When a translation wins, the author receives €75,000 and the translator €25,000. There have been 31 winners. The latest is Ali Smith’s Gliff, announced on 21 May 2026.
How this page chooses
Two jobs, kept apart. The timeline further down lists all 31 winners from 1996 to 2026, with the language of every translated book — facts only.
The ten with a full entry are the ten most recent winners, 2017 to 2026, one for each year. There is no ranking in it. Under each one is a line of plain fact about the book, the author or the translator, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first, one for each year. The line in red is a fact about the book, its author or its translator, not an opinion about it.
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Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
Ludo, a Portuguese woman living in Luanda, bricks herself into her flat around the time Angola becomes independent, and stays there for about thirty years, until a young burglar, Sabalu, finds a way in.
It was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.
On All Souls’ Day, Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, sits at his kitchen table in Mayo and remembers his life. The whole novel is one sentence, and slowly it becomes clear that Marcus is dead.
It also won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2016.
On a mountain in northern Idaho, Jenny kills her young daughter May and is jailed for life. Her husband Wade, who has early-onset dementia, marries again, and his new wife Ann tries to imagine her way into what happened.
It was Ruskovich’s first novel.
An eighteen-year-old known only as “middle sister” is pursued by a paramilitary called the Milkman, and the gossip of a community that watches everyone puts her in more danger than he does.
It won the Booker Prize in 2018; Burns was the first writer from Northern Ireland to win it.
A couple and their two children drive from New York to Arizona, while children are disappearing at the US border and the history of the Apache is never far away. It ends with a set of Polaroid photographs.
It also won the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2020.
Translated from the French by Frank Wynne
Three generations of one family, from a Kabyle grandfather in Algeria during the war of independence to his granddaughter Naïma in Paris, who goes looking for the history nobody told her.
Frank Wynne also translated Atomised, the 2002 winner, so he is the only translator to have won the award twice.
Translated from the German by Jo Heinrich
Short pieces about the clients of a chiropodist in Marzahn, a district of tower blocks in what was East Berlin. Oskamp stopped writing for a while and worked there as a chiropodist herself.
It was Jo Heinrich’s first literary translation.
Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter
A secondary-school teacher in communist Bucharest keeps a diary in the late 1970s and 1980s. It begins with queues and school meetings and grows into a huge, strange novel about the nature of reality.
The first book translated from Romanian to win the award.
In Mockbeggar, an isolated outport on the coast of Newfoundland in the early colonial years, a brother and a sister are locked in a long and bitter rivalry.
It was nominated by libraries in Newfoundland and Labrador.
In a near future run on surveillance and data, two children, Briar and Rose, are left homeless and have to survive on their own, and they make friends with a horse.
It has a companion novel, Glyph, which can be read on its own.
All 31 winners. The twelve translated books are marked with the language they were written in, and the ten in red have a full entry above.
Most prizes are entered by publishers, which means a book only has a chance if its publisher sends it in. Here nobody can enter a book: public libraries around the world nominate the novels their readers should know about, and a jury picks the winner from those. For 2026, eighty libraries from more than thirty countries nominated 69 books, thirty of them translations from seventeen languages.
The 2026 winner, Gliff, was nominated by the Katona József Library in Hungary.
Twelve of the 31 winners were written in another language. Two translators turn up twice in the prize’s history in different ways: Frank Wynne won it twice, with Houellebecq’s Atomised in 2002 and Zeniter’s The Art of Losing in 2022, and Michael Hofmann, who translated the 1998 winner, Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums, won the International Booker in 2024 with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos.
The one Dutch winner is Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (Boven is het stil), translated by David Colmer, in 2010.
An Irish prize for a novel written in English or translated into English, worth €100,000. The books are nominated by public libraries around the world, not entered by publishers.
Ali Smith, for Gliff, announced on 21 May 2026 at the International Literature Festival Dublin.
€100,000. If the winning book is a translation, the author receives €75,000 and the translator €25,000.
The fund set up by IMPAC, the company that paid for it from the start, ran out at the end of 2014. Since 2015 the prize has been paid for by Dublin City Council alone, and it was renamed in November 2015.
Only public libraries. Publishers, authors and agents cannot submit books.
Yes: The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer, in 2010.
The dates are not out yet. In recent years the longlist has come in February, the shortlist in April and the winner in May.
Every winner since 2017 has a full entry on this page. If you want the most talked-about one, start with Milkman; for something short and warm, Marzahn, Mon Amour.
Winner list last verified 22 September 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“It nudges the reader to reflect on the future of education, environmental destruction, family and human survival.”
— The 2026 Dublin Literary Award judges, on Gliff
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