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Vona Groarke wins 2024 Michel Déon Prize

Books newsletter: a preview of Saturday’s pages; PEN Heaney Prize and Waterstones Book of the Year shortlists; Writers in the Attic; Robert Fisk archive at TCD; Little Island’s Carnegie success

A tribute to Nell McCafferty

Books newsletter: Irish Writers’ Weekend in London; Kit de Waal to judge Women’s Prize for Fiction; Oscar Wilde exhibition; Korean prize for Anna Burns

Circling The Square hits the spot

Books newsletter: Forward prizes; Baillie Gifford shortlist; Claire Keegan wins Lenz Prize; Bookshop of the Year; Writer of Courage 2024; Tanya Sweeney book deal; Leaves Festival; Macavity Awards

Anne Haverty to give Stinging Fly annual lecture

Books newsletter: Tomorrow’s pages; Irish judges for Nero awards; Rooney Writer Fellow; ISLA, Bram Stoker, IMRAM and Murder One festivals; Irish Book Week; Publishers for Palestine

Freyja Hellebust wins Gerald Griffin Competition

Books newsletter: Saturday’s pages; Belfast International Arts Festival; Red Line Book Festival; TS Eliot lecture; Allingham Festival; Oisín Fagan book deal; Semaus Heaney fellows; In Their Shoes podcast

Children’s Books Ireland reading guide launched

Books newsletter: Saturday’s pages previewed; Wendy Erskine, Fíona Scarlett, Seán Farrell book deals; TCD arts festival; Italian book festival; Anne Enright event; Dayton Literary Peace Prize; MoLI seeks new director

Vona Groake and Martina Evans honoured

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and Saturday’s pages previewed

Chidi Ebere wins best debut over 50 prize

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and preview of Saturday’s pages

The Anxious Generation: Jonathan Haidt lays out potential solutions to the crisis, all of which depend upon collective action

Haidt invites us to consider the many harms of the Great Rewiring in terms of the ‘opportunity cost’ of near total immersion in a virtual world

Garth Risk Hallberg’s The Second Coming: Bigger isn’t always better

Creaking under its own weight, at half the size this could have been twice as powerful

Una Mannion wins Gold Dagger Award

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and preview of tomorrow’s pages

Rebecca Watson: ‘There’s a simpler way to tell the story. But it would feel less honest to me’

The author’s new book continues to play with layout to convey consciousness but spans a longer stretch of time than her debut

Myles Dungan: ‘Rural Ireland was riddled with class distinctions’

‘Agrarian insurgencies predated the struggle for independence. Most were far more prolonged, bloody and militarily effective than nationalist uprisings,’ says the historian

Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel: Remakes emigration and its impact on relationships in an invigorating shape

The novel sets out to dismantle the gender binary while also dissecting it, all the time riffing with energy and insight on nostalgia

I Love You I Love You I Love You by Laura Dockrill: A ‘will they, won’t they, tale’, tinged with noughties nostalgia

The legacy of Dockrill’s young adult writing career is evident in chirpy proses that brims with exclamation marks, superlatives and capitalisations

David Nash wins Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize

Books newsletter: a roundup of the latest news and preview of Saturday’s pages

Chris Whitaker: ‘I sometimes wonder if the road I went down was linked to this violent act that happened when I was a kid’

A chance discovery in a library helped Whitaker overcome the trauma of a brutal stabbing and set him on the path to becoming a writer

Massacre in the Clouds: it is a fine work and will go some way to restoring this incident to the mainstream of history

The title is a pointed correction of the misnomer ‘the battle above the clouds’, by which the slaughter was known at the time

Summer reading: 21 great books for the holidays

This list has something for everyone with books covering dystopian realities, historical settings, criminal capers and familiar places

Soula Emmanuel wins SoA award

Books newsletter: a preview of Saturday’s pages and round-up of the latest news

John McGahern Prize for debut Irish fiction 2023 shortlist revealed

Prof Shovlin said, ‘Five years feels something like maturity for the prize and we were delighted to see, once again, a very strong field’

Liz Nugent up for top crime prize

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and a previee of Saturday’s pages

Reeling in the Queers by Páraic Kerrigan: a reminder of the stigma and violence gay people faced

This book is as much a celebration of queer joy, as it is an insight into the transgression, trauma and tragedy that shaped queer Ireland over the past fifty years

Maggie O’Farrell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives reveal links between O’Farrell and the Irish diaspora

The editor of the volume, novelist Elaine Canning, has created the first comprehensive guide to O’Farrell’s writings, incorporating the responses of reviewers and a wide-ranging interview with the author herself

Walled in by Hate. The Friends and Enemies of Kevin O’Higgins: balance, honesty and humanity

O’Higgins was demonised by many who opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty that established the State

June’s YA fiction: magical realism grounded by sharp observations about teenage social dynamics

At one point Elk notes the gift of being ‘left alone’ at school: ‘I learned pretty quickly that I could be myself and get away with it’

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