Books

A plethora of prizes and a new festival

A preview of Saturday’s books pages and a round-up of the latest news

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Martin Doyle
Thu May 20 2021 - 13:15

This Saturday’s Irish Times Eason offer is the No 1 bestseller, The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. When you buy the paper at any store, you can buy the book for 4.99, a saving of 5 euro. Saturday’s pages feature Darragh Geraghty’s selection of the best new audiobooks for summer; an interview by Alex Clark with Valeria Luiselli, winner of the Dublin Literary Award for Lost Children Archive; an extract from Sinead O’Connor’s new memoir, Rememberings; an interview by Amy O’Connor with Caroline O’Donoghue about her new YA novel; and Declan Kiberd reflects on Bob Dylan at 80, filtered through the latest crop of books about the great man.

Reviews include Suzanne Lynch on Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe; John Boyne on Second Place by Rachel Cusk; Declan Burke on the best new crime fiction; Neil Hegarty on The Garden by Paul Perry; Anna Carey on The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym By Paula Byrne; Sarah Gilmartin on The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green; Oliver Farry on The Altar Boys by Suzanne Smith; and Sarah Moss on I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay by Deirdre Sullivan.

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As You Were by Elaine Feeney has been shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize for authors first published in their 40s alongside Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart for Shuggie Bain among others. The ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award for short stories features Eventually Meeting the Sky Somewhere by Maeve O’Lynn and I Told You Not to Fly So High by DM O’Connor. The winners of all nine Society of Authors’ Awards will be announced on June 9th in an online ceremony introduced by novelist Joanne Harris.

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Catherine Ryan Howard has been shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for The Nothing Man, alongside among others Robert Galbraith, Stuart Turton and Ruth Ware. John Banville has been shortlisted for the Sapere Books Historical Dagger for Snow, his first crime novel published under his own name, along with Michael Russell for The City Under Siege. Jennifer Wilson O’Raghallaigh has been nominated for a Debut Dagger (Competition for an unpublished novel. A psychologist in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital, she was a finalist in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2019. The winner sof the Crime Writers Association (CWA) Daggers Awards will be unmasked on July 1st.

A City and A Garden, commissioned by Sounds from a Safe Harbour in association with Body & Soul as part of the Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh and Cork Midsummer festival, brings together some of Ireland's most exciting writers, musicians, and voice artists to realise a new state-of-the-art sonic experience that combines story and song with the world around us.

From June 11th-20th, visitors will discover, through smartphone technology, the stories and songs that lie hidden in the trees and bricks of our city spaces; interwoven narratives and soundscapes that envelop you as you walk a Cork city street or the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin.

It features voice artists and musicians Tolü Makay, Dorothy Murphy, Hilary Rose, Conor Lovett, Seán Mac Erlaine, Fish Go Deep and The Quiet Club, and writers Lisa McInerney, Louise Hegarty, Melatu Okorie and Gavin Corbett.

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Shola von Reinhold has won the Republic of Consciousness prize for small presses for their “dazzling” queer debut novel LOTE. The £20,000 prize money will not go to the Scottish author alone but will be split among the 10 publishers on the longlist.

Published by Jacaranda as part of founder Valerie Brandes’ initiative to publish 20 black British writers in 2020, LOTE follows Mathilda, a black woman fixated by a forgotten black Scottish modernist poet. Judge John Mitchinson called it a dazzling novel that makes the reader “stand back and gasp at the wit, beauty and mischief von Reinhold has brocaded into the story”.

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A Sydney-based Limerick man who wrote about the January 6th insurrection in Washington DC and its aftermath is about to be published in an American short story anthology. Journalist Pádraig Collins is one of 25 finalists chosen from around 1,000 entries and his story, What Comes Next, will feature in Owl Canyon Press's From the Corner of My Eyes short story collection in July. Collins's best friend since they were aged six, Paul Cussen, was one of those featured in the previous Owl Canyon collection.

Canongate will publish Poetry Unbound by Pádraig Ó Tuama in October 2022, a book of poetry based on the podcast of the same name. Launched last year, each podcast offers an immersive reflection on a single poem. The book will gather some of the poems from the first three series and will also include brand new selections, exclusive to the book.

Ó Tuama, an Irish poet, conflict mediator and theologian., said: “I am thrilled to be joining Canongate for the publication of Poetry Unbound. Jamie Byng and the team have shown heart and enthusiasm for the project. Poetry Unbound started as a podcast from On Being, and in a year, we racked up four million downloads. It’s been moving to hear from so many people - some poets, some well read in poetry, others new to it - who have found interest in the approach taken to poems in this project. I’ve always read poetry with curiosity, and as part of a conversation, and Canongate have shown such a huge interest in this approach. It’s a joyous pairing.”

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Adults and children alike can get creative and enter a poem or poems into this year’s Trócaire Poetry Ireland Poetry Competition, the deadline for which has been extended to May 27th. This year marks the 11th year of the annual competition, which uses the arts to raise awareness about the leading global justice issues of our time. Adults and children, through their schools, can enter the competition and poems in English or Irish are welcome in all six categories, with spoken word pieces actively encouraged as well as poems.

The theme for this year is ‘Pathways to Peace’. It explores the effects that conflict has on people’s lives and how, with pathways to peace and the support of others, they can try to put the pain of conflict behind them and begin again in their lives.

For more information and to enter, visit here.

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New Yorker Raven Leilani has been awarded one of the world’s largest literary prizes for young writers - the 20,000 pound Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize - for her ‘fearless’ debut Luster, a provocatively page-turning and painfully funny novel about what it means to be a black millennial woman in America.

Described as ‘brutal - and brilliant’ by Zadie Smith, ‘remarkable’ by Candice Carty-Williams and chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of the last year, Luster has established thirty-year-old Leilani as an unflinching new voice in literary fiction.

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The British Association of Irish Studies Book Prize winner is Erika Hanna for Snapshot Stories: Visuality, Photography, and the Social History of Ireland, 1922-2000 (OUP, 2020). Highly Commended was Stephen R Millar for Sounding Dissent: Rebel Songs, Resistance, and Irish Republicanism (Michigan, 2020). Essay Prize winner was Dexter Govan (Edinburgh) fopr Towards a Religious Understanding of the Orange Order: Belfast 1910 to 1914.

Bursary Prize winners are Eliza Cozzi (Oxford) for Italy and the Irish Romantics: Networks, Nations and Literary Encounters, 1798-1848; Will Fleming (London) Small Press Poetry and Modernization in Ireland 1959-2017; Abigail Fletcher (Edinburgh) From Partition to Decriminalization: Homosexuality in Northern Ireland, 1921-1982; Phoebe Gill (Birmingham) Women’s experiences of Sex and Desire in Ireland 1870-1928; Struan Kennedy (Northumbria) (Re)Writing on the Wall: Disarming Weaponized Murals and Masculinities in NI; Michael Livesey (Sheffield) From Dissident to Deviant: A Genealogy of Terrorism in NI; Jessica McIntyre (Leeds Beckett) Food Cultures in Ireland: New Perspectives on the Irish Bourgeoise in the C19; Josie Richardson (Oxford) From Dungannon to Drumcree: Street Politics in NI.