Young Skins, the award-winning debut short story collection by Colin Barrett, is the new Irish Times Book Club reading choice.
The collection has been garlanded with several major awards since it was published last spring, including the Guardian first book award, the 2014 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Barrett became only the second Irish writer to win the latter alongside Edna O’Brien. He has just had another story published in January’s New Yorker and has been longlisted for the £30,000 Sunday Times short story prize, the world’s richest.
Barrett, who was born in 1982 and grew up in Co Mayo, was championed by Declan Meade, editor of the Stinging Fly magazine, which first published him in 2009. In September 2013, within weeks of another of his writers, Kevin Barry, winning the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, Meade was alerting reviewers to an "original voice" about whose forthcoming collection he was very excited. Meade was struck by the combination of a high literary style, emotional intelligence and dark humour. "Hidden and at times disturbing depths lurk beneath the surface bravado," wrote Irish Times Literary Correspondent Eileen Battersby. Young Skins was published in Britain by Jonathan Cape and Grove in the US.
Writing in Guardian Review, Barrett said the collection was full of the "usual things that transpire within the confines of any small town … misjudgments and violence, affairs and kindnesses, silences and eruptions".
It is the intensity of the short story which attracts him, Barrett wrote, citing Anne Enright’s description of John McGahern’s stories as the “literary equivalent of a hand grenade rolled across the kitchen floor”. In some of his stories the explosion is yet to come, while others explore the “ringing aftermath”, but “that is what I wanted these stories to be infused with: the pure combustibility of being alive”.
Young Skins is "from line to line … as interesting as prose can get these days," Enright, one of the judges, said. "You expect everything to go horribly wrong in these stories, but they move towards redemption and not disaster. Barrett is very good at the unexpected. You're working through something that's feels gritty and hard but by the end, each story has turned into something almost lyrical and open. That's real writing."
This Friday, we shall publish a short story from Young Skins, and over the next few weeks Colin Barrett will contribute an essay about the inspiration for his work and join us for a podcast to discuss his collection. We will also republish our review of the book and an interview with the author, but we also want to hear what you think as you work your way through the collection.
