Congratulations to Lisa McInerney, who has been jointly awarded the £10,000 Encore Award 2018 with fellow John Murray author Andrew Michael Hurley.
McInerney, winner of the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize for her debut The Glorious Heresies, received the award for her second novel, The Blood Miracles. A sequel set in urban Ireland, the judges called it “a wild ride” with “potent prose”.
McInerney called it “such a boost”, also conceding the difficulties of writing a second novel. “Writing a second novel is made so much more intense by the worry that the first was the proverbial lightning captured in a bottle; the Encore provides an emphatic reiteration of welcome, so I’m pleased and very grateful,” the Galway-based writer said.
Fellow Irish author Sally Rooney’s debut Conversations With Friends was pipped at the post for the £20,000 Rathbone Folio Prize this week by Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami, a nonfiction book that brings together six years the foreign correspondent spent collecting firsthand accounts of the 2011 catastrophe’s impact. Delving into Japan’s folklore around grief and death, Lloyd Parry discovers strange and harrowing stories of survivors attempting to make sense of their losses, including those who never recovered a body.
Coming up in Saturday’s Irish Times, June Caldwell pays tribute to her friend and mentor Nuala O’Faolain on the 10th anniversary of her death in an introduction to a new edition of Are You Somebody?
We also have Andrew Hadfield on Natives by Akala and Stig Abell’s How Britain Really Works; Adrian McKinty on Milkman by Anna Burns; Martina Evans on Catholic Boy by Rosemary Jenkinson; Peter Murphy on Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson; Sarah Gilmartin on Kismet by Luke Tredget; Michael O’Loughlin on The Neighbourhood by Mario Vargas Llosa Anne Chambers on a biography of Brendan O’Regan by Brian O’Connell and Cian O’Carroll; Susan McKay on Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose; Bryan Fanning on New to the Parish by Sorcha Pollak; Sinéad Gleeson on The Recovering by Leslie Jamison; Eilis Ní Dhuibhne on Kudos by Rachel Cusk; John Waddell on The Quest for the Irish Celt: The Harvard Archaeological Mission to Ireland by Mairéad Carew; Claire Hennessy on the best new YA; and Julie Parsons on Theory of War by Joan Brady; and a new poem by Rachael Hegarty.
