- 2021 Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
- 2020 Beloved – Toni Morrison
- 2019 Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
- 2018 The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope
- 2017 Palace Walk – Naquib Mahfouz
- 2016 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
- 2015 Absalom, Absolom! – William Faulkner
- 2014 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- 2013 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- 2012 The Illiad – Homer
- 2011 The Red and the Black – Stendhal
- 2010 Middlemarch – George Elliot
- 2009 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
- 2008 The Aenied – Virgil
- 2007 The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
- 2006 Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
- 2005 Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
- 2004 Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
- 2003 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- 2002 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
- 2001 Beowulf – translation by Seamus Heaney
- 2000 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
- 1999 Inferno – Dante
- 1998 Odyssey – Homer
