Books

Lisa McInerney is joint winner of £10,000 Encore Award for ‘The Blood Miracles’

Galway author shares prize with fellow John Murray writer Andrew Michael Hurley

Lisa McInerney with her Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2016 for The Glorious Heresies. Its sequel, Thwe Blood Miracles, has just won the Encore Prize. Photograph: Ian West/PA

Thu May 10 2018 - 10:45

Lisa McInerney has been jointly awarded the Encore Award 2018 with fellow John Murray authors Andrew Michael Hurley after the judges agreed each writer “more than earned their place”. The authors will share the £10,000 prize.

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”. It features many of the same characters as her first novel including Ryan Cusack, who the judges – chair Alex Clark, Julia Copus and Ted Hogkinson – described as “convincingly complex” and “driven in equal measure by instincts for survival and self-destruction”.

Hurley, whose debut The Loney won the Costa First Novel Award and was named the British Book Industry Awards Book of the Year in 2016, was recognised for his second novel Devil’s Day. The novel, a modern English gothic set in a small village on the Lancashire moors, follows schoolteacher John Pentecost and his new wife, Katherine, a vicar’s daughter, as they return to the farm where he grew up in the aftermath of his grandfather’s death. The judges said they were “spellbound”, calling it “menacing and masterful” with “an all-consuming sense of the nearness of evil”.

Clark said it wasn’t that they couldn’t make up their minds or that there was deadlock. She explained: “We simply couldn’t put a cigarette paper between these two splendid novels and wanted to acknowledge and reward them both”.

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Hurley said he was “really honoured” to receive the award. “In many ways, a second novel is a much greater challenge for a writer than the first, so I’m pleased Devil’s Day struck a chord with readers,” he said.

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.

Fintan O’Toole, praising The Blood Miracles as “skilfully wrought and highly evocative” in his Irish Times review, wrote: “Following up directly on such a highly praised debut is risky precisely because it seems so safe. The difficult second novel syndrome is evaded by essentially carrying on with the first. But McInerney does have more business to conduct with these characters. The Blood Miracles never feels like a warmed-up rehash of past inspiration – it has its own energies. Nor, in spite of its use of familiar gangster story tropes, does it feel too much like an exercise in genre fiction.

“The Glorious Heresies was praised above all for its exuberance, the wild pitches between the lurid and the tragic that gave McInerney’s writing its distinctive quality. Even though its content is continuous with the first book, The Blood Miracles is somewhat different in style and form. It is less rambunctious and more disciplined, less explosive and more controlled, less panoramic in its portrait of Cork’s underworld and more tightly focussed on Ryan himself.

“It swaps the volatile verve of a fiery debut for the more finely calibrated rhythms of the well-made novel. There is still plenty of vivid action – at times the book reads like a straight thriller – and still the salty tang of the Cork dialect that gave The Glorious Heresies its pungent linguistic flavour, but the overall feel is more artful.

“ If The Glorious Heresies was riotous, The Blood Miracles is vertiginous. The pace is dizzying, the pulse ever-quickening.”

In an Irish Times interview with fellow writer Paul McVeigh, McInerney said: “I had in my head that very famous hendiatris ‘sex, drugs, rock and roll’. ‘Three words, one idea’ became ‘three novels, one broader story’. Heresies was sex, Miracles is drugs . . . which leaves me with a rousing symphonic epic to write for the closer. Each novel works on its own too, I think, so I think it will be more of a set than a trilogy.”

Of the final book in the series, due out next year, McInerney said: “It’ll be multi-narrative again, sprawling in the way Heresies was but Miracles isn’t. Landscape to portrait to landscape again, if you know what I mean.”

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 on Japan.

Other runners-up included Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, Richard Beard’s memoir The Day That Went Missing and Xiaolu Guo’s Once Upon a Time in the East. The award only began accepting non-fiction two years ago, as part of a widening of its remit to reward excellence in forms beyond fiction writing.

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, who, in many cases, sought the help of mediums in the hope of locating their loved ones’ remains. Ghost stories began to take shape: Christian, Shinto and Buddhist priests are repeatedly summoned to quell unhappy spirits as reports of possessions rise; while a group of friends report being visited by the ghost of a dead woman in their temporary housing, leaving dampness on the cushion they believed she had been sitting on.

Studying the hundreds of accounts, Lloyd Parry comes to understand that “everyone’s grief is different, and that it differs in small and subtle ways according to the circumstances of loss”.

“You don’t expect a work of non-fiction to express itself with such literary beauty, but still hold a very unshaking mirror to real events in the real world,” said chair of judges, novelist Jim Crace, who was joined by authors Nikesh Shukla and Kate Summerscale. “It was that combination of reportage and high literature that was so impressive. When I finished reading this book, not only did it close the gap between me and Japan, it also closed the gap between my understanding of my culture and every other culture in the world. I know that is a grand claim to make, but it gave me a sense of the universality of humankind that would improve my understanding of any differences in any community in the world that I come across in the future. It was an improving experience. This is a book to close cultural gaps.”

Lloyd Parry received his prize at a ceremony in London on Tuesday night. – (Guardian Service)