In The Irish Times this Saturday, award-winning poet and Trinity academic Seán Hewitt tells Niamh Donnelly about his debut novel, Open, Heaven. And there is a Q&A with Caroline Madden about her debut, The Marriage Vendetta.
Reviews are Daniel Geary on Greg Grandin’s America, América; Gemma Tipton on Those Passions: On Art and Politics; Colm McKenna on Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman; Elizabeth Mannion and Brian Cliff on the best new crime fiction; Peter Berresford Ellis on The Celts: A Modern History by Ian Stewart; Ian Hughes on Hayek’s Bastards by Quinn Slobodian; John Boyne on The Edges by Angelo Tijssens, translated by Michele Hutchison; Val Nolan on The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal; Andrew Gallix on Ewan Morrison’s For Emma; Tadhg Hoey on The Eyes of Gaza by Plestia Alaqad; and John Self on Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane.
This week’s Irish Times Eason offer is the brilliant The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry, just €5.99, a €6 saving. It’s just been shortlisted for the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.
Tana French has been longlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for her latest novel, The Hunter. Also longlisted is Bridget Walsh for The Innocents, her second in a series of crime novels set in a down-at-heel Victorian music hall. The Tumbling Girl, her debut novel, won the UEA Little Brown Award for Crime Fiction 2019. Walsh was born in London to Irish immigrant parents, “a heritage of which I am very proud”. She has a PhD in Victorian domestic murder and an obsessive interest in the weirder elements of nineteenth-century life.
Dervla McTiernan is longlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for What Happened to Nina? along with Stuart Neville for Blood Like Mine. Stiff competition includes Chris Brookmyre for The Cracked Mirror, Chris Whitaker for All the Colours of Dark and Don Winslow for City in Ruins.
Frank Wynne is up for a Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger for Going to the Dogs by Pierre Lemaitre. Clara Dillon (The Playdate) and Andrew Hughes (Emma, Disappeared) are on the Twisdted Dagger longlist.
Canadian Irish writer Damhnait Monaghan has been shortlisted for this year’s Commonwealth Short Story prize for Nualu Nu, a story set in 1970s Canada, in which schoolgirl Nuala faces the challenges of immigration and adolescence after moving from Ireland with her widowed mother.
The Cprize is awarded annually for the best piece of unpublished short fiction from any of the Commonwealth’s 56 member states. It is the most accessible and international of all writing competitions: in addition to English, entries can be submitted in Bengali, Chinese, Creole, French, Greek, Malay, Maltese, Portuguese, Samoan, Swahili, Tamil, and Turkish.
The stories on the 2025 shortlist were selected from a total of record-breaking 7,920 entries from 54 Commonwealth countries – almost ten per cent higher than 2024. Two Commonwealth countries – Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Lucia – have authors on the shortlist for the first time. The shortlisted writers range in age from 21 to 75 and all but one have never been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize before.
The shortlisted stories will be published in the online magazine of the Commonwealth Foundation, adda (addastories.org), which features new writing from around the Commonwealth. The judges will go on to choose a winner for each of the five regions; the regional winners will be announced on May 14th before being published online by the literary magazine Granta. The overall winner will be announced on June 25th.
A Life in Translation: Daniel Hahn in conversation with Sinéad Mac Aodha is taking place on Monday, April 28th, at 7pm, in MoLI, Dublin. Book now.
Hahn’s award-winning translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include a wide range of fiction and nonfiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas. Hahn is the recipient of prizes including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Dublin Literary Award (2017, for his translation of Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion), and an OBE for his services to literature. He is a former chair of the Translators Association and the Society of Authors and helped to establish a new prize for literary translation (the TA First Translation Prize) by donating half of his winnings from the Dublin Literary Award. He has also translated Pelé's autobiography and is currently translating a Guatemalan novel, co-editing (with Padma Viswanathan) a collection of Brazilian short stories, and writing a book about Shakespeare.
He will be joined in conversation by Sinéad Mac Aodha, the Director of Literature Ireland. The conversation will be recorded for release on Radio MoLI as part of the Books and Their Makers podcast.
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For one week, hundreds of Independent bookshops in over 50 cities around the world from Westport to Brooklyn will distribute “The Global Book Crawl Passport” to book lovers. Over 1,000 passports will be distributed in Ireland for the inaugural global event this year. The initiative will run on for the summer – inviting readers “to take their bookshop on holiday with them this summer”. There are also spaces for stamps from participating international bookshops when book lovers visit Malaga or Florence for example.
Events will be held to celebrate the passport holders during Independent Book Week on 14th -21st June and Irish Book Week 18th-25th October.
Bríd Conroy of Tertulia Bookshop believes this is just the beginning “we know the importance of bookshops as community and cultural spaces. This is our first worldwide event, all celebrating the Global Book Crawl on the same week in April, but it will grow and grow each year as bookshops want to be part of it. In Ireland we have over 100 independent bookshops and can’t wait to have them all on board”.
The campaign is spreading on Instagram @globalbookcrawl #globalbookcrawl; building a global literary map, one bookshop and one post at a time.
