What were your cultural highlights for the year gone by?

Mike McCormack's beautiful, brilliant novel Solar Bones. A Heritage Week walk around the JFK Arboretum in New Ross, Co Wexford, meeting some remarkable trees in the company of the peerless Thomas Pakenham. Hong Ling's monumental Huangshan paintings at the Chester Beatty Library. The BBC drama series The Missing, a thriller which – for once – actually deserved the name. Oh, and Chris Packham's poodles "singing" along with Pure by The Lightning Seeds in the Animal Symphony on Sky Arts, ending what has been an intermittently farcical, tragicomic 12 months on a note of pure joy.

And what let you down?

Late-capitalist democracy. If it was an arts organisation it would have had its funding slashed for its performance this year.

What was the dominant plot twist of 2016?

In an age when we're being told that people read mostly formula fiction, post-truth memoir and celebrity cookbooks, it was gratifying to see Solar Bones finding an audience, winning both the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction and the Eason's Book Club Book of the Year.

Was it for that? How did our centenary celebrations strike you?

Dignified, moving and family-friendly, the State commemoration on Easter Sunday offered “a new song of compassion, inclusion and engagement, a song of listening, social justice and respect for all”. We could do with another few verses around drinkable water (yes please), fracking (no thanks) and the enforcement of the Bird and Habitats Directives – but it’s good to be able to sing about where we’d like to go, other than to hell in a handcart.

And what will be your cultural resolution for 2016?

Having discovered – by accident – Lionel Davidson's undeservedly forgotten cult thriller Kolyimsky Heights, I intend to investigate his back catalogue. The Night of Wenceslas and The Rose of Tibet, here I come.

2016 in three words?

Phew. It’s over.