A Caravaggio painting, a hangover and the discovery of a child’s body buried 2,000 years ago in a Sligo field were the inspiration for this year’s winners of the 46th annual Hennessy Literary Awards.
Rachel Donohue won the overall Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award at a ceremony in the Baroque Chapel at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday night, as well as the Emerging Fiction prize, for her story The Taking of Mrs Kennedy. Sean Tanner won the First Fiction category and Una Mannion the prize for Emerging Poetry.
Elaine Cullen, Moët Hennessy’s market development manager, said: “Hennessy is intrinsically linked to the Irish way of life and we are committed to supporting Irish culture. The Hennessy Literary Awards is one of the longest running cultural sponsorships in Ireland and we are proud to welcome Rachel, Sean and Una into the Hennessy family of New Irish Writing.”
Dubliner Donohue, who was shortlisted for the Hennessy First Fiction Award in 2013 and the Hennessy Emerging Fiction award in 2014, said: “This story really began as a ghost story. I wanted to capture the sense of shadows under a seemingly perfect life. Caravaggio’s painting The Taking Of Christ fed into this mood of a dark fate and along with it came the idea of betrayal.”
Tanner, from Cork, said of his winning story, I Could Have Been A Dancer: "With years of research behind me, hangovers seemed an obvious subject to write about. I was trying to capture some of the abstracted terror and tangential insight that often accompany this fallen state. It was supposed to be light hearted, but in the middle it just ran off on me."
Sligo poet Mannion's winning poem Crouched Burial was inspired by her personal experience as a teenager. "The summer I was 15, a child's body was found in our field in Culleenamore, Co Sligo. The child, 2,000 years old, was lying in a crouched position, on her side, foetal, arms holding herself. The imprint of her small frame in the earth and details of her burial shaped this poem."
Since 2003, the Hennessy Literary Awards has inducted one eminent nominee each year into the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame. This year's inductee is celebrated poet Vona Groarke, who won the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award in 1993 and is now a member of Aosdána and teaches at the University of Manchester. Writers previously honoured include Éilís Ni Dhuibhne, Patrick McCabe, Colum McCann, Frank McGuinness and Anne Enright.
This year’s judges were Elizabeth Day, Mike McCormack and Ciaran Carty. Day won the Betty Trask Award for her first novel, Scissors Paper Stone.Her fourth novel, The Party, is due out in July. McCormack’s third novel, Solar Bones, won the Goldsmiths Prize and was voted Irish Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. He is director of NUI Galway’s BA with creative writing. In 1993 New Irish Writing published his first fiction. Carty has edited Hennessy New Irish Writing since 1988. His books include include a two-part biography of Robert Ballagh; Confessions of a Sewer Rat; and Intimacy with Strangers.
