Irish Book Awards
あいりっしゅ・ぶっく・あわーず
Ireland's annual literary award. Honors books and authors across multiple categories through a combination of public voting and panel judging.
- Established
- 2006
- Organizer
- Irish Book Awards (independent non-profit organization since 2007). Main sponsor: An Post (since 2018)
- Category
- Children's Literature, Fairy Tales, and Picture Books
- Selection Method
- Vote
- Target
- Newcomer
- Frequency
- 1 per year
- Application Deadline
- around August
- Announcement Period
- around November
- Status
- Active
Description
The Irish Book Awards is Ireland's annual literary award, started in 2006 (originating from the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel Prize). Since 2007, it has been operated by an independent non-profit company with sponsor support. Multiple categories are featured, with 7 categories judged by panels such as the Irish Literary Academy, and some categories determined by public vote. Since 2011, the An Post Irish Book of the Year (Book of the Year) has been selected from the category winners. Main sponsors: Bord Gáis Energy (2012–2018), An Post (since 2018). The award ceremony is typically held in late November.
Prize
- Main Prize
- Winners in each category (trophy/title). The honor of An Post Irish Book of the Year.
- Media exposure from winning
- Promotion from bookstores and publishers
- Recognition through Lifetime Achievement Award
Selection
Selection Process
| Stage | Judges | Pass Rate | Announcement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nomination/Shortlist selection | Judges for each category (Irish Literary Academy etc. judge some categories) | Unknown | Shortlist announced on official site and media |
| Public vote | General readers (online voting) | Unknown | Categories decided by public vote are announced at the ceremony based on online voting results |
| Final selection by judges | Specialist judging panel (per category) | Unknown | Category winners selected by judges are announced at the ceremony |
| An Post Irish Book of the Year selection | Since 2011, determined by public vote from category winners (method may vary by year) | Unknown | Book of the Year may be announced after the ceremony or separately (e.g., early December) |
Criteria
- Literary merit (expression, structure, style)
- Originality
- Quality of storytelling
- Research and fact-checking (non-fiction)
- Suitability for children's books (appropriateness for age group)
- Publishing quality (editing, design)
- Reader and market reception (emphasized in public vote categories)
Related Awards
- Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel Prize (historical origin)
- New Voices: The An Post Writing Prize
- RTÉ Audience/Listeners' Choice (related public voting initiative)
- Dublin Literary Award (related international literary award)
- Irish Times literary awards
Official Resources
https://www.irishbookawards.ie/Past Winners
A historical novel set in theatrical London, where fame, ambition, and the Jack the Ripper era collide.
A historical novel set in theatrical London, where fame, ambition, and the Jack the Ripper era collide.
An essay collection on body, memory, motherhood, and loss that expands private recollection into cultural reflection.
An essay collection on body, memory, motherhood, and loss that expands private recollection into cultural reflection.
An oral history of the children killed in the Northern Ireland conflict, built from interviews and archival research.
An oral history of the children killed in the Northern Ireland conflict, built from interviews and archival research.
A memoir that traces Vicky Phelan's life from an early accident and motherhood to her cancer diagnosis and the public struggle that followed.
A memoir that traces Vicky Phelan's life from an early accident and motherhood to her cancer diagnosis and the public struggle that followed.
Set in the bar of an Irish hotel, the novel follows 84-year-old Maurice as he toasts five people who shaped his life and looks back on the memories that remain.
Set in the bar of an Irish hotel, the novel follows 84-year-old Maurice as he toasts five people who shaped his life and looks back on the memories that remain.
A novel following Connell and Marianne from school in the west of Ireland into university life. Through restrained dialogue and subtle psychological detail, it traces intimacy, miscommunication, class difference, and fragile self-worth.
A love story that follows two people over several years, capturing not only what they say but the silences between them.
A memoir tracing the author's childhood, drug use, teenage pregnancy, return to education, and path into public life. Through personal history, it speaks frankly about class, addiction, and young people left outside social systems.
A memoir about a woman who stops running from herself, faces her past, and finds a public voice for change.
An illustrated guide to lighthouses across Ireland. It presents their navigational function, coastal culture, history, and local character through both practical information and an evocative visual approach.
A book that portrays the lighthouses guarding Ireland's coast, together with the histories and memories of their places.
A collection of personal essays about family, addiction, the body, miscarriage, infertility, and pains that are often kept silent. By examining private experience with candor, it questions expectations placed on women to be strong and quiet.
An essay collection that turns difficult pain into language and brings hidden experience into the open.
A psychological thriller about Cordelia, who has spent years on the French Riviera passing herself off as an English socialite. Beauty, lies, family wounds, and memories of flight gather beneath a glamorous surface until ruin breaks through.
A woman who has spent her life pretending to be someone else begins to unravel under the bright light of the Riviera.
『Midwinter Break』は、熟年の夫婦が旅先で経験する出来事を通じて、結婚生活の距離感や個々の孤独、人生の意味を静謐に描く長編。控えめな筆致が登場人物の内面を浮かび上がらせる。
『Midwinter Break』は、熟年の夫婦が旅先で経験する出来事を通じて、結婚生活の距離感や個々の孤独、人生の意味を静謐に描く長編。
『Wounds』は、戦地報道の経験と家族の愛を重ね合わせた回想録で、紛争の記憶と個人的な傷を繊細に描く。報道者として直面した現実と私的な痛みが交差する内容。
『Wounds』は、戦地報道の経験と家族の愛を重ね合わせた回想録で、紛争の記憶と個人的な傷を繊細に描く。
『Atlas of the Irish Revolution』は、地図やデータ、エッセイを組み合わせて1912–1923年のアイルランド革命の経緯を視覚的に再構築する書。歴史的事象を地理的に示し、従来の理解を拡張する意欲的な成果物である。
『Atlas of the Irish Revolution』は、地図やデータ、エッセイを組み合わせて1912–1923年のアイルランド革命の経緯を視覚的に再構築する書。
『I Found My Tribe』は、病や喪失を経て支え合える共同体(tribe)を見つける過程を綴った個人的な回想録。脆さと連帯、回復についての率直な記述が印象的で、読者に共感を与える。
『I Found My Tribe』は、病や喪失を経て支え合える共同体(tribe)を見つける過程を綴った個人的な回想録。
『He: A Novel』は、スリリングなプロットと複雑な人物描写で展開する長編で、復讐や正義といった普遍的テーマを扱う。緊張感ある語りと意外な転回が読者を引き込む。
『He: A Novel』は、スリリングなプロットと複雑な人物描写で展開する長編で、復讐や正義といった普遍的テーマを扱う。
A lifetime-achievement honor recognizing contributions to literature.
A lifetime-achievement honor recognizing contributions to literature.
Solar Bones begins from the feeling that the dead may return and traces one engineer's life as a flow of memory. Its unusual form keeps society, family, and loss tightly linked.
It follows a life and its losses in one continuous sentence.
I Read The News Today, Oh Boy traces the brief, dramatic life of Tara Browne. It vividly brings to life the atmosphere of 1960s London and the shape of a figure elevated into myth.
A short life takes shape in the heat of 1960s London.
The Glass Shore is an anthology of short stories by women writers from Northern Ireland, overlaying regional history with women's experience. Its editorial strength lies in gathering many voices into one volume.
It gathers women's voices from Northern Ireland into one horizon.
Red Dirt follows young Irish migrants in Australia as collapse and violence overtake them. In harsh surroundings, responsibility and self-destruction gradually come to the surface.
In a foreign wilderness, the cost of choice is laid bare.
A lifetime-achievement recognition for the Irish poet John Montague.
An award honoring a long career as one of the central voices in Irish poetry.
A novel that follows a mother and her four children to explore family bonds, failure, and reconciliation. Its multigenerational perspective examines how individual choices shape a family over time.
It looks across generations at the memory and fracture of a family.
A nonfiction work that traces the young lives lost in the 1916 Easter Rising through testimony and research. It makes visible the individual lives hidden behind a major historical event.
It recovers the lives of young people buried beneath history.
The Long Gaze Back is an anthology of Irish women writers whose stories gather multiple generations of voices into one volume. Its editing links historical inheritance with a contemporary reading experience.
It shows the depth of Irish women's writing across generations.
Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a debut novel that quietly explores alienation and connection through the relationship between a lonely man and a dog. Its seasonal structure makes the emotional changes feel especially delicate.
Loneliness and companionship unfold alongside the changing seasons.
Irelandopedia is a children's book that introduces Irish geography, culture, and history through illustrations and bite-sized facts. It packages encyclopedic material in an accessible and playful voice.
A county-by-county tour of Ireland in one book.
A warm, funny novel about Jimmy Rabbitte returning to the world of The Commitments. Illness, family, and middle age give the story its emotional edge, but the voice stays playful and alive.
Jimmy Rabbitte returns in a funny, poignant middle-aged follow-up.
A memoir that moves through depression, faith, family, and the search for steadiness. Michael Harding writes with openness and lyricism about how love, illness, and everyday life shape the self.
A memoir of depression, love, and the search for steadiness.
A history book that tells Ireland’s story through a hundred objects. Each object opens onto a larger account of politics, culture, daily life, and memory.
Ireland’s history told through one hundred objects.
A debut novel set in a small Irish community, where family ties, local memory, and women’s lives slowly come into focus. Its atmosphere is quiet and rooted in place.
A debut novel of family, memory, and women’s lives in a small town.
A candid memoir of the life and career of Edna O’Brien. It follows her from rural Ireland into literary fame, showing both the exhilaration and cost of that journey.
A candid memoir of a life in letters.
A mature novel about memory, guilt, and atonement. Through an aging actor’s recollections, it explores the passing of time and the hidden weight of family and desire.
It follows memory and loss through a quiet but forceful voice.
A crime novel set in Ireland’s recession-era housing wastelands. A murder investigation pulls a detective into a case shaped by family strain, economic collapse, and buried personal history.
A murder case opens onto recession, family strain, and buried history.
A scholarly atlas that maps the Irish Famine through geography, statistics, images, and historical commentary. It turns a vast historical catastrophe into a richly documented reference work.
An atlas that maps the Great Irish Famine through history and data.
A candid memoir of Edna O’Brien’s life, from rural Ireland to an international literary career. It follows her growth, her writing, and the personal costs of a remarkable public life.
A candid memoir that traces a life through writing.
A recipe book built around Italian food culture and family cooking. It combines accessible recipes with the idea that good food is part of a slower, more attentive way of living.
A cookbook that brings Italian family cooking into the home kitchen.
A warm ensemble novel about guests gathering at a country house hotel on Ireland’s west coast. Each character brings a private burden, and the novel follows their search for renewal and ease.
A winter gathering becomes a story of renewal and second chances.
A picture book with a dry sense of humor and a gentle message about ownership and friendship. A boy’s certainty that the moose is his slowly gives way to a wider idea of sharing and belonging.
A playful picture book about ownership, sharing, and friendship.
The final volume of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series, full of magic, action, and high-stakes adventure. Artemis, Holly, Butler, and Mulch face an ending that threatens both their world and themselves.
A fast, magical finale that raises the stakes for the entire series.
A memoir of training, discipline, and the road to Olympic gold. Katie Taylor reflects on boxing, faith, and the pressure of carrying a nation’s hopes.
A boxer’s path to Olympic gold, told in her own words.
A multi-voiced novel about life in Ireland after the financial crash. It traces jobs lost, loyalties strained, and the fragile bonds of a community under pressure.
A chorus of voices captures the damage left by the crash.
A frank political memoir that mixes public life with private memory. Mary O’Rourke writes about family, power, success, disappointment, and the emotional cost of a long career in public life.
A frank memoir of political life and private loss.
A candid, funny memoir about feminism and modern womanhood. Caitlin Moran turns personal experience into a lively, direct account of the questions, frustrations, and freedoms that shape women’s lives.
A candid and funny memoir that makes feminism feel immediate.
A haunting novel about an older woman writing down the story of her life while a second narrative quietly reveals the pressures and secrets around her.
A haunting novel about an older woman writing down the story of her life while a second narrative quietly reveals the pressures and secrets around her.
A fast-moving crime thriller about FBI agent Ren Bryce, whose investigation into an avalanche murder drags her into her own troubled past.
A fast-moving crime thriller about FBI agent Ren Bryce, whose investigation into an avalanche murder drags her into her own troubled past.
A sequence of village vignettes in which Alice Taylor celebrates community life in rural Ireland while reflecting on shared values and the environment.
A sequence of village vignettes in which Alice Taylor celebrates community life in rural Ireland while reflecting on shared values and the environment.
A long interview portrait of Seamus Heaney that retraces his life, his poems, and his ethical commitments from childhood through the Nobel Prize and beyond.
A long interview portrait of Seamus Heaney that retraces his life, his poems, and his ethical commitments from childhood through the Nobel Prize and beyond.
A multi-voiced novel about a charismatic politician and the women whose lives he harms, using shifting perspectives to expose charm, power, and abuse.
A multi-voiced novel about a charismatic politician and the women whose lives he harms, using shifting perspectives to expose charm, power, and abuse.
A picture-book bedtime journey that uses verse and illustration to create a warm, imaginative experience about love and reassurance between parent and child.
A picture-book bedtime journey that uses verse and illustration to create a warm, imaginative experience about love and reassurance between parent and child.
The second Skulduggery Pleasant novel, in which humor, magic, and fast-paced adventure drive Valkyrie Cain and her allies toward a darker confrontation.
The second Skulduggery Pleasant novel, in which humor, magic, and fast-paced adventure drive Valkyrie Cain and her allies toward a darker confrontation.
Ronan O'Gara's own account of his rugby career, combining match-day insight with the pressures and setbacks of life at the top of the sport.
Ronan O'Gara's own account of his rugby career, combining match-day insight with the pressures and setbacks of life at the top of the sport.
A suspenseful novel in which a man cursed with visions of death struggles to build an ordinary life before the visions return and reshape it.
A suspenseful novel in which a man cursed with visions of death struggles to build an ordinary life before the visions return and reshape it.
A haunting novel about an older woman writing down the story of her life while a second narrative quietly reveals the pressures and secrets around her.
A haunting novel about an older woman writing down the story of her life while a second narrative quietly reveals the pressures and secrets around her.
A sharp novel about family history, secrets, and the weight of memory. As the protagonist remembers, the past is gradually uncovered and private and social pain become tightly interwoven.
A nonfiction work that critically examines Ireland’s historical politics and its leaders. It re-evaluates figures and events in political history and considers the relationship between public memory and justice.
A nonfiction work that critically examines Ireland’s historical politics and its leaders. It re-evaluates figures and events in political history and considers the relationship between public memory and justice.
A popular contemporary novel about relationships and self-renewal. Written with humour and warmth, it follows characters through difficulty and hope, and it has found a wide readership.
An introduction to Irish history written for younger readers. With illustrations and plain language, it presents the country’s past in a way designed to spark children’s interest in history.
A novel that powerfully cuts through fragments of everyday life. Its direct style brings out the characters’ conflicts and hopes, and universal themes of growth and loss come to the fore.
An autobiography of former Ireland rugby international Trevor Brennan. It traces his life from boyhood in Leixlip through his playing career in Toulouse and the conflicts that marked the later stages of that career. The book goes beyond match reports to explore the culture around his move abroad, his relationships, and his inner life as a professional athlete.
A candid autobiography in which a former Ireland rugby international tells the story of his life and playing career in his own words.
A dark novel where unease and humour mingle. As past and present intersect in strange ways, the desires and loneliness hidden inside the characters are brought to the surface.
An edited collection of new and selected work from Irish literature. Bringing together short fiction and essays by multiple writers, it offers an anthology-like view of the field’s diversity and change.
A topographical nonfiction work that carefully records the place names, landscape, and history of Connemara. It offers a deeply observant account of nature and human life in the region.
A popular satirical novel about urban life and middle-class habits. Its brisk narration and humour expose everyday pretension, making it an easy and widely enjoyed read.
A whimsical picture book about a boy who tries to gain knowledge by eating books. Its humour and warmth celebrate the joy of reading and learning for young children.
A fable-like novel for younger readers set against the Second World War. Through the eyes of an innocent boy, it powerfully conveys the cruelty of war and the divisions between people.
An autobiographical memoir by a former professional footballer. It candidly recounts the highs and lows of a playing career, injuries, and emotional struggle, and it traces a powerful path back to recovery.
A book by a new writer on women and lifestyle. Blending humour with personal observation, it presents self-discovery and a female perspective in an easy, lively tone.
A fable-like novel for younger readers set against the Second World War. Through the eyes of an innocent boy, it powerfully conveys the cruelty of war and the divisions between people.
A quietly observant novel of loss and memory. As the truth about the past is slowly revealed, the protagonist’s inner life and nostalgia are rendered in a lyrical, emotionally restrained style.
A critical essay collection on culture, vision, and memory. It probes how images and photographs shape perception and personal recollection, and it asks hard questions about contemporary culture.
A children’s fantasy that weaves together music, time, and folklore. It tells the story of a boy’s growth, family, and the legends rooted in his town with warmth and poetic grace.
Set against the political and religious tensions of seventeenth-century England, this historical novel follows a man pulled between conscience and desire. It watches, with a cool eye, as violence and faith pressure the ordinary world from every side.
In the midst of historical upheaval, one man's secret quietly sets collapse in motion.
A multi-voiced novel that reconstructs Rudolf Nureyev’s life through the people around him, moving from the Second World War to 1980s New York. Fame, desire, art, and exile are kept in tense balance throughout.
A chorus of witnesses brings Rudolf Nureyev’s life into focus.