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The Irish Times awards two prizes. Founded in 1988 and originally sponsored jointly by that newspaper and Aer Lingus, thereafter by the Irish Times alone, the awards are described as "offering Irish writers, novelists as well as those in other categories, a new opportunity to work towards a prize which is comparable with that available to writers in other countries. . . . The institution of an award with an international dimention in addition to a purely Irish award, will allow Irish writers to be judged against international standards." Thus there is a group of Irish Literature Prizes, awarded for poetry and nonfiction as well as fiction, and an International Fiction Prize, which is given to the author of a work of fiction written in English and published in Ireland, the UK, or the United States, and which has in fact usually gone to a North American. The International Fiction Prize is worth IR£7500, the Irish Literature Prizes IR£5000 each. The judges are a panel of literary editors and critics who "call in" books from publishers and choose the winner from a shortlist.
| 1989 | Frank Ronan | The Man Who Loved Evelyn Cotton | |
| 1990 | fiction poetry |
John McGahern Ciaran Carson |
Amongst Women Belfast Confetti |
| 1991 | non-fiction first book |
J. J. Lee Colm Toibin |
Ireland 1912-1985 The South |
| 1992 | fiction poetry |
Patrick McCabe Derek Mahon |
The Butcher Boy Selected Poems |
| 1993 | non-fiction first book |
Brian Keenan John MacKenna |
An Evil Cradling The Fallen and Other Stories |
| 1995 | fiction non-fiction poetry |
Kathleen Ferguson Paddy Devlin Robert Greacen |
A Maid's Tale Straight Left Collected Poems |
| 1997 | fiction non-fiction poetry |
Seamus Deane Declan Kiberd Paul Muldoon |
Reading in the Dark Inventing Ireland New Selected Poems |
| 1999 | fiction non-fiction poetry |
Antonia Logue Neil Belton Seamus Heaney |
Shadow-Box The Good Listener. Helen Bamber: A Life Against Cruelty - Opened Ground |
| 2001 | fiction non-fiction poetry |
William Trevor Angela Bourke Michael Longley |
The Hill Bachelors The Burning of Bridget Cleary The Weather in Japan |
| 1989 | Don DeLillo | Libra |
| 1990 | A. S. Byatt | Possession |
| 1991 | Louis Begley | Wartime Lies |
| 1992 | Norman Rush | Mating |
| 1993 | E. Annie Proulx | The Shipping News |
| 1995 | J. M. Coetzee | The Master of Petersburg |
| 1997 | Seamus Deane | Reading in the Dark |
| 1999 | Lorrie Moore | Birds of America |
| 2001 | Michael Ondaatje | Anil's Ghost |
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