Mary Lavin is to become the first female Irish writer to have a public space named after her.
The quarter-acre square at Wilton Park in Dublin is part of a major redevelopment of the area by developer IPUT, which will include the European headquarters of LinkedIn.
Mary Lavin Place will link Lad Lane, where she lived for many years, to Wilton Park. A naming ceremony on Friday will coincide with the 25th anniversary of Lavin’s death in 1996 aged 83.
Lavin was born in the US in 1912 and moved to Ireland when she was 10. She grew up in Bective, Co Meath, where her father worked as an estate manager.
Her first volume of short stories, Tales from Bective Bridge, was published in 1942 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was a master of the form and won the Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1961 and Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1961.
She also wrote three novels – The House in Clewe Street (1945), Mary O’Grady (1950) and A Likely Story (1957) – but remained best known for her short stories.
“I don’t think a story has to have a beginning, middle and end. I think of it more as an arrow in flight or a flash of lightning, lighting up the whole landscape all at once, beginning, middle and end,” she once said.
Lavin was widowed twice. Her first husband, William Walsh, died suddenly in 1954, leaving her with three young children. Her late daughter Caroline Walsh was the literary editor of The Irish Times. Her second husband, Michael Scott, whom Lavin married in 1969, died in 1991.
The announcement of Mary Lavin Place has been welcomed by her family. Her grandson Adam Peavoy said the decision was apt given that the mews at 11 Lad Lane was where she would entertain contemporaries from the world of literature. A commemorative piece of public art is also being commissioned as part of the initiative.
