In The Irish Times this Saturday, Jonathan Coe tells John Self about his latest novel, The Proof of My Innocence. As Anu and Landmark Productions in association with MoLI present a new theatrical adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead, Deirdre Falvey goes behind the scenes. Ronan McGreevy explains the history behind The National University of Ireland Centenary Roll of Honour and Essays, which he has co-edited with Dr Emer Purcell. Manchán Magan, author of Brehons and Brahmins: Resonances between Irish and Indian Cultures, explores the links between the two nations. Chrissy Donoghue Ward, author of The Fairy Queen, illustrated by Monika Mitkute, talks to Ella Slaone about Traveller culture. And there is a Q&A with John Boyne about his latest novel, Fire.
Reviews are Patricia Craig on David Marcus: Editing Ireland, edited by Deirdre Madden and Paul Delaney; Donald Clarke on Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino; Declan O’Driscoll on Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai; Catherine Taylor on the best new translated fiction; Houman Barekat on States of Play: How Sportswashing Took Over Football by Miguel Delaney; Henrietta McKervey on Fire by John Boyne; Brigid O’Dea on Rita, A Memoir by Rita O’Hare, At the End of The Day by Jimmy Kelly and Until We Fall, Long Distance Life on the Left by Helena Sheehan; NJ McGarrigle on The Place of Tides by James Rebanks; Adrienne Murphy on Stronger by Nicola Hanney; Conor Brady on Kinahan Assassins by Stephen Breen and John Hand; Paul Clements on local history; and Sarah Gilmartin on The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy.
This weekend’s Irish Times Eason offer is Where They Lie by Claire Coughlan, just €5.99, a €6 saving.
Two Irish Times poetry reviewers have been recognised for their own writing.
Vona Groarke has won the 2024 Michel Déon Prize for nonfiction for her book Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara (New York University Press). The prize was presented by President of the Royal Irish Academy, Prof Pat Guiry and Ruaidhri Dowling from the Department of Foreign Affairs. The ceremony was attended by the newly-appointed French ambassador to Ireland, Céline Place, and featured a conversation between the winner of the 2023 Académie Française Michel Déon Prize, Pierre Adrian, and Prof Clíona Ní Ríordáin of the University of Notre Dame.
Prof Hastings Donnan, Chair of the RIA Michel Déon judging panel, said: “Hereafter is a rich and gripping mix of poetry, prose and archival material that evokes the ineffable, recovers lost histories and gives context to shadowy figures. Finding the life and humanity of her heroine Ellen O’Hara hidden in the corners of census returns, newspaper cuttings and passenger lists, Vona Groarke has written a truly powerful, enchanting and singular account that illuminates the lives of Irish women migrants. Honourable mention should be given to all the shortlisted authors whose quality of writing, originality and contribution to public debate captivated the judging panel.”
Acknowledging the calibre of the shortlisted titles, Prof Guiry said: “We were thrilled by the outstanding quality of submissions for the 2024 Michel Déon Prize and believe that Vona is a deserving winner through her telling of a difficult period in history in such a unique and beautiful manner. I also want to recognise and congratulate the other shortlisted authors, whose remarkable work set the bar incredibly high and made selecting the winner a difficult task for our eminent judging panel.”
Martina Evans is one of six poets shortlisted for the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, which recognises a single volume of poetry by one author, published in the UK or Ireland, of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships. It is organised by English PEN, together with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney.
The winner will be announced on December 2nd at a ceremony at the Great Hall, Queen’s University Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. Tickets to the ceremony are free and available to book here.
The full shortlist is: The Coming Thing by Martina Evans; Isdal by Susannah Dickey; Hyena! by Fran Lock; Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness; We Play Here by Dawn Watson; A Tower Built Downwards by Yang Lian, translated by Brian Holton.
The prize has been judged by poets Nick Laird, Paula Meehan and Shazea Quraishi, with Catherine Heaney joining them as non-voting Chair and representing the Estate of Seamus Heaney.
Of the shortlisted titles, the judging panel said:
‘Susannah Dickey’s Isdal is an astonishingly inventive look at a cold case, that of an unidentified woman found in 1970 near Bergen in Norway. Armed with a wide variety of forms and a formidable vocabulary, Dickey explores and satirises the true crime genre, and specifically our culture’s obsession with female victims.’
‘In The Coming Thing Martina Evans offers a powerfully realised world – 1980s Cork – and an unforgettable narrator, Imelda, on a journey to England for an abortion. From the strictures of a Republic which denied Irish women bodily autonomy until constitutional change in 2018, Evans creates an Everywoman on the brink of the digital age.’
‘Fran Lock’s Hyena! comes at the reader with all the feral energy of its totem animal; it’s a devouring and hallucinatory work that channels the embodied grief of the queerminded into a mirror for our age. At its deep heart’s core is a righteous and riotous engagement with working class culture’s magnificent anarchic spirit.’
‘Patrick McGuinness’s Blood Feather is a profound work of elegy, principally for the author’s mother, but also for the objects and places overtaken by time, for dynamited cooling towers and villages replaced by shopping centres, for the way one language replaces another. McGuinness is a brilliant ‘connoisseur of the noises things make when they leave’.’
‘Dawn Watson’s We Play Here is an extraordinary long poem spoken by four twelve-year-old girls in working class Belfast in the summer of 1988. Watson has a remarkable ability to recover both the sensations of childhood and the febrile atmosphere of the Troubles, where terror was normalised and violence endemic.’
‘Yang Lian’s A Tower Built Downwards, impeccably transported from the Chinese by Brian Holton, offers us a clear lens on the lived reality of a haunted world of exile and displacement. Steeped in classical Chinese poetry, with a spirited understanding of historical forces, Yang offers us elegy as a sublime art in a fallen world.’
Zoe Sadler, Events and Prizes Manager at English PEN, said: “The surprising, distinct, and deeply personal ways in which each of these six poets engages with the impact of cultural or political events on the human condition reflect both the expansive creative potential of this type of poetry and the judges’ thoughtful approach to their task. It’s incredibly exciting to present such an ambitious inaugural shortlist.”
The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize is supported by Hawthornden Foundation.
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Three Irish authors, Colm Tóibín, Ferdia Lennon and Sally Rooney are among the contenders for this year’s Waterstones Book of the Year.
Voted for by Waterstones booksellers, the Book Of The Year title is a much-coveted award, with the illustrious list of previous winners ranging from Philip Pullman and Maggie O’Farrell to Charlie Mackesy, Paul McCartney and Katherine Rundell.
Intermezzo, the highly anticipated latest novel by Sally Rooney and Long Island, the heartbreaking follow-up to Colm Toíbín’s beloved Brooklyn are joined by Glorious Exploits, the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize winning novel from Ferdia Lennon.
The Waterstones Book of the Year 2024 will be chosen by a Waterstones panel and be announced on November 28th.
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Author Elizabeth Reapy is curating a new literary event in Hotel Doolin, Co Clare, on Wednesdays this winter. She will be interviewing some of Ireland’s top writers about their career journey and creative processes as well as inviting them to share their wisdom on how to sustain a writing lifestyle.
This first series of Writers in the Attic will feature Noel O’Regan on November 13th, Danny Denton (20th), Jan Carson (27th), Mary Costello (December 4th) and Danielle McLaughlin (11th).
Events are from 8pm to 9pm in The Attic in Hotel Doolin, tickets are €15 from doolinarts.ie. The hotel is offering accommodation packages for the series on hoteldoolin.ie.
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Trinity College Dublin has received €200,000 in funding from the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science to support the conservation of the personal archive of the renowned late journalist and Trinity graduate Robert Fisk and his wife, Nelofer Pazira-Fisk.
The Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Patrick O’Donovan, announced the funding at Trinity’s Eavan Boland Library on Tuesday with Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, Trinity Provost Dr Linda Doyle, and Librarian and College Archivist Helen Shenton in attendance.
The Archive, spanning Fisk’s 50-year journalistic career, was donated to the library by Nelofer Pazira-Fisk.
Fisk received a PhD in political science from Trinity College Dublin in 1985 and maintained a lifelong connection with the university. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2008.
The Robert and Nelofer Pazira-Fisk Archive & Library encompasses material from Fisk’s first posting in Belfast in 1972 for the London Times until the posthumous publication of his final book, The Night of Power: Betrayal of the Middle East (2024). Notes from his interviews with Osama bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan are among the extensive range of notebooks, research notes, photographs, audio files of interviews, drafts for published works, and correspondence of letters and emails. The collection also includes artefacts such as explosives shells and salvaged items such as the strip of an oil painting taken from a church by Islamic State.
The library will make this Archive fully accessible as soon as possible for readers and researchers in-person and online. There is extensive work involved in cataloguing, conserving and preserving, and digitising an archive of such significance.
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CG Moore’s Trigger has been nominated for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Writing, their publisher Little Island’s ninth book to receive a nomination in the five years since Irish-published books have been admitted to the world’s most prestigious children’s book prize.
