Kerry group shortlist
Sebastian Barrys The Secret Scripture, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award earlier this year, is among the five novels on the shortlist for the €15,000 Kerry Group Fiction Award, which also includes the debut novel John the Revelatorby Peter Murphy. The other titles are Hugo Hamiltons Disguise; Deirdre Madden's Molly Fox's Birthdayand Joseph O'Neills Netherland. The winner will be announced on the opening night of Listowel Writers' Week on May 27th.
The judges – novelist Giles Foden and teacher and critic Niall MacMonagle – chose the five from almost fifty titles submitted, and announcing the shortlist in Dublin on Wednesday MacMonagle said neither he nor Foden knew yet who’d win.
“We have some re-reading to do.” But judging by his speech, they have already read the five shortlisted titles meticulously.
Through his character Roseanne McNulty, Barry has in The Secret Scripturegiven us a story where emotional recall and imagined truth combine to create a powerful tale said MacMonagle, adding that "immediacy of voice" was one of the many striking things about the novel.
Memory, he said, also played a vital part in Hamilton’s Disguise in which the character Gregor Liedmann’s story was a story that began in chaos in 1940’s Germany and charted the horrors of war, displacement, family fragmentation and secrets. Disguise was he said “the fragile story of survival” which explored the complexities and complications of truth telling.
Deirdre Madden's Molly Fox's Birthdaywas both a day-in-the-life and a life-in-the-day novel: "The setting is one day, one place but the book never seems small: we are in Paris, in the North of Ireland, on the stage, at the Menin Gate as the past is interwoven with the present," he said, adding: "It's a Mrs Dalloway for our times."
Peter Murphy's John the Revelatorwas a mother/son story, said MacMonagle: "a bildungsroman set in small-town Ireland and if it sounds familiar and if you think you've read it all before, read Peter Murphy and you'll realise that he's made it all his own, he's made something new." Speaking of the book's energy he went on: "At times raw, transgressive, violent, ugly, Murphy's world is also one of love and tenderness and captures the contradictions and crazyness of adolescence, loss and male friendship."
Just as the Titanic’s fatal maiden voyage cast a long shadow over the twentieth century, we now all live in the shadow of the collapsed Twin Towers, said MacMongale, adding that O’Neill’s Netherland brought us to 21st century New York, a city brilliantly evoked. An enriching novel, it examined what it means to be caught up in a world where uncertainty is the norm.
New EU literary prize
Times are tough on the economic front so what a pleasure to hear details of a new literary prize. The Irish Writers’ Union in partnership with CLÉ – the Irish Book Publishers’ Association, The Irish Playwrights’ and Screenwriters’ Guild and the Irish branch of the Booksellers’ Association has just announced details of the EU Prize for Literature, Ireland 2009 (EUPL) worth €5,000 and which will be awarded to an emerging writer of fiction in Ireland.
This is an EU-wide project aimed at new writers who have published at least two books of fiction since 2004. Short and long fiction will be considered, in English or Irish.
An Irish jury composed of Sorcha de Brun, Clare Dowling, Alan Hayes, Conor Kostick and John McNamee will unveil an Irish shortlist in mid-May and a winner at the end of May. The prize-winning ceremony will be in Brussels in September.
See euprizeliterature.eu