First champagne, now Baileys: the head of Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies, must be spinning. A week after being longlisted for the £10,000 Desmond Elliott Prize, which came with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a champagne flute, the debut novelist has been shortlisted for the £30,000 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, as has Anne Enright, for The Green Road. (Top tip, Lisa: if, like me, you find Baileys rather cloying after a couple of glasses, try mixing it with whiskey. You're welcome.)
Mary Costello was the only Irish author to make the 10-strong shortlist for the €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award for her debut novel, Academy Street.
Meanwhile, Louise O'Neill is to cowrite the script for a TV adaptation of her novel, Asking for It. Both have been Irish Times Book Club choices, as has The Glorious Heresies. Just saying. But there is much to read about all three on irishtimes.com/books.
The debut novelist Austin Duffy features alongside four of Ireland's best-known authors on this year's €15,000 Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award shortlist in association with Listowel Writers' Week. Duffy's This Living and Immortal Thing was nominated alongside The Blue Guitar, by John Banville; Beatlebone, by Kevin Barry; The Green Road; and Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs.
The €5,000 Pigott Poetry Prize shortlist features There Now, by Eamon Grennan; The Boys of Bluehill, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin; and Geis, by Caitriona O'Reilly. Both awards will be announced in Listowel on Wednesday, June 1st, when the poet Paul Muldoon opens the festival.
Galway's week-long literary festival, Cúirt, which starts this weekend, includes some great pairings: Jennifer Johnston and Belinda McKeon; Louise O'Neill with the American writer Rachel B Glaser; and Kevin Barry with the Canadian author Patrick deWitt. History, politics, music, storytelling, food and theatre events across the week promise something for everyone. The full programme is at cuirt.ie.
Barry, Nuala Ní Chonchúir and Mary Morrissy are among the writers taking part in Cork World Book Fest, a five-day festival at Cork City Library and Triskel Christchurch from April 19th to 23rd, which also features Ed Vulliamy and Louis de Paor.
Although we publish the latest bestsellers in Ireland each week, one piece of raw data we don’t have room for but whose significance can be striking is the original date of publication. Most titles have been published in the past 12 months, as you might expect, so the older outliers stand out as works that have stood the test of time (well, a couple of years anyway) and have thus taken the first step to classic or at least cult status.
Step forward Foster, by Claire Keegan, first published on September 2nd, 2010, currently just outselling Me Before You, by Jojo Moyes, released on January 5th, 2012. In nonfiction, Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying came out on April 3rd, 2014, but the veteran of the charts is, appropriately enough, a history book, Joseph A McCullough's A Pocket History of Ireland, published on March 26th, 2010. Pocket-sized it may be, but even at £4.50 a pop it must have made a tidy packet by now for its publisher, Gill, and author.
One last thought. Apart from the phenomenon that is David Walliams, who has four books in the children's and young-adult top 10, all but one of the others are Irish, Derek Landy leading the way with the second instalment of his Demon Road trilogy (successor to his phenomenally successful Skulduggery Pleasant series), followed by 1916 titles by Patricia Murphy and Rod Smith, Dave Rudden's debut novel and Cecelia Ahern's first attempt at young-adult fiction.
Martin Doyle is Assistant Literary Editor
