Annal:2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
My Name Is Red: A Novel
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin winner
- Score: 10.53
When the Sultan commissions a great book to celebrate his royal self and his extensive dominion, he directs Enishte Effendi to assemble a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed, and no one in the elite circle can know the full scope or nature of the project.
Panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears, and the Sultan demands answers within three days. The only clue…
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2001 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.53
A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America…
A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria…
A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon…
Lives already in motion, unsettled by war, and about to change beyond reckoning—their pasts blurred and their destinies at once defined and distorted by an inconceivable event. For that man was bound for the desert of Los Alamos, the woman unexpectedly en route to a refugee camp, the girl at Ground Zero…
- 2004 Booker shortlist
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 12.54
This novel provides insight into the intricacies of a changing South Africa at the end of the 1990s. Silas Ali, a former political activist, now a middle-aged civil servant working on the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, is shopping in the Killarney Mall in Johannesburg when he bumps into a ghost from his past-Lieutenant François du Boise, a retired security policeman. This chance encounter brings back a memory that Silas and his wife Lydia have been avoiding for 20 years. The past erupts into the present, cracking off the shell of normalcy that…
- 2002 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 2001 NBA–Fiction winner
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2002 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 50.52
Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it’s the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson’s disease, or maybe it’s his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn’t seem to understand a word Enid says.
Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid’s children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel…
The Royal Physician's Visit: A Novel
Per Olov Enquist, Tiina Nunnally
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.53
Set in Denmark in the 1760s, The Royal Physician’s Visit magnificently recasts the dramatic era of Danish history when Johann Friedrich Struensee, a German doctor from Altona, student of Enlightenment philosophers Diderot and Voltaire, and court physician to mad young King Christian, stepped through the aperture history had opened for him and became for two years the holder of absolute power in Denmark.
Dr. Struensee, tall, handsome, and charismatic, introduced hundreds of reforms, many of which would become hallmarks of the French Revolution 20 years…
- 2002 Orange winner
- 2002 PEN-faulkner winner
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.52
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected…
The Painter of Birds: A Novel
Lídia Jorge, Margaret Jull Costa
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.53
The setting of this extraordinary novel is an old farmhouse in Portugal-a house far enough from the Atlantic not to hear the breaking waves during a storm but near enough for the walls to be corroded by the salt in the air.
With most members of her large family having left the hardship of life in this landscape of sand and stone for jobs in faraway places, a young woman struggles to piece together her past from the widely varying stories she’s been told. Left behind by a free-spirited, feckless father, a seducer with a rare gift for drawing, she is raised by…
That They May Face the Rising Sun
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.53
Considered by many to be the finest Irish writer now working in prose, John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun vividly brings to life a whole world and its people with insight and humour and deep sympathy.
Joe and Kate Ruttledge have come to Ireland from London in search of a different life. In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through the action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play. By the novel’s close we feel that we have been…
