Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne, The Hoarder by Jess Kidd, The Cruelty Men by Emer Martin, Travelling in a Strange Land by David Park and Normal People by Sally Rooney have been shortlisted by judges Carol Drinkwater and Ian McGuire for the €15,000 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award, which will be presented at Listowel Writers’ Week on May 29th. Remarkably, Milkman by Anna Burns, winner of the Man Booker Prize, did not make the cut.
Little Island Books has won the Irish Small Press of the Year at the British Book Awards, having been shortlisted with Lilliput Press and Wordwell Books.
But this week’s biggest Irish books news is that Cork author Danielle McLaughlin has won the $165,000 Windham-Campbell Award in London, a wonderful reward for a remarkable talent and one of the most highly regarded people in the Irish literary world.
Coming up in the books pages of Saturday’s Irish Times is a deeply moving essay by Fionnuala O’Leary on the long tail of her grief for her father John, who died when she was a child. His Hennessy New Irish Writing award inspired her to follow in his footsteps in the hope of finding him again. (We are also publishing online John’s Hennessy award-winning short story from 1977, Remember Minnie Plowden!)
Rónán Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul, explains why his book book “is a tribute to the kindness I have experienced all my life”.
Reviews include Niamh Donnelly on Charlie Savage by Roddy Doyle; Seán Hewitt on Make Me a City by Jonathan Carr; Patsy McGarry on In The Closet of the Vatican by Frédéric Martel; Neil Hegarty on St Patrick Retold by Roy Flechner; Sinead McCoole on Dr Jennifer Redmond’s Moving Histories, Irish Women’s Emigration to Britain from Independence to Republic; Julie McDowall on Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Futureby Kate Brown; Éilís Ní Dhuibhne on M For Mammy by Eleanor O’Reilly; David Capener on Walter Gropius by Fiona McCarthy; Lara Marlowe on Christophe Guilluy’s Twilight of the Elites; Prosperity, the Periphery and the Future of France; Sally Hayden on New Daughters of Africa by Margaret Busby; Sarah Gilmartin on The Red Word by Sarah Henstra; and Rob Doyle on The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
And this week’s special offer when you buy The Irish Times in any Eason store is €6 off the cover price of The Burning Chambers by Kate Mosse.
