Madeleine Keane: Congratulations to the new Laureate for Irish fiction 2025-2028 Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, plus summer school season launches
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Irish Post
20-07-2025
- Irish Post
President Michael D. Higgins to release spoken word album
PRESIDENT Michael D. Higgins is to release a spoken word album featuring his poetry set to music by Myles O'Reilly. The 10-track album is due be released on September 5, not long before the end of Higgins' second term as president in November. The title track, Against All Certainty, has already been released and is available now via streaming platforms. 'Incredibly interesting life' Higgins, 84, began his political career in 1973 when he was appointed to the Seanad by Taoiseach Liam Cosgrove. He later served two terms as TD for Galway West and for several years was Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. However, throughout his political career, he also worked as a writer, broadcaster and poet. He had a regular column for the music magazine Hot Press and has had four poetry collections published, as well as a number of non-fiction books. Against All Certainty is the president's debut spoken word album and will feature 10 of his most well-known works. "Listeners can expect to find themselves fully transposed into the incredibly interesting life and times of the poet before he became Ireland's President, from childhood to adulthood," press for the album states. The album was recorded in Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence and office of the President of Ireland. The tracks will be set to musical compositions by O'Reilly, a member of the band Juno Falls, who has also directed a number of music videos and documentaries. 'Prodigious poems' Against All Certainty will be released on CD, hardback CD book and vinyl formats by Claddagh Records. Irish novelist, playwright and poet Sebastian Barry, who was Laureate for Irish Fiction from 2018 until 2021, hailed the president's work. "These are truly prodigious poems by Michael D. Higgins — not just a milestone in his own work but in Irish poetry," he said. President Higgins will step down from his role later this year, having served the maximum two terms. The album is available to pre-order from Claddagh Records by clicking here. See More: Claddagh Records, Michael D Higgins, Poetry
Irish Times
20-07-2025
- Irish Times
New Laureate for fiction Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: ‘I was part of a movement of women writers of Ireland'
It is typical of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's modesty that she was delighted even to be shortlisted for the €50,000-a-year role of Laureate of Irish Fiction. This week's news of her appointment, succeeding Colm Tóibín , Sebastian Barry and Anne Enright , has left her 'overwhelmed'. It feels like 'even more of an honour', she says, than her PEN award for an outstanding contribution to literature, the Hennessy Irish Writing Hall of Fame award or her appointment as Burns Professor at Boston College. More pragmatically, she observes that another difference is that it involves 'a fair amount of responsibilities and duties. It's a very public role. You don't just grab the medal and walk off.' This laureate will not be resting on her laurels. While she is still discussing with the Arts Council the details of her three-year programme, one idea that appeals to her is visiting every county to celebrate its distinctive literary heritage. READ MORE As a bilingual writer, the daughter of an Irish-speaking father from the Donegal Gaeltacht who grew up speaking Irish in Dublin, she will also be promoting literature in Irish, 'which I've already been doing thanks to The Irish Times', a reference to her reviewing work, which she thinks helped raise her profile for the laureateship. 'People believe they can't read a book in Irish, that it's too difficult, but it just takes a bit of effort. Even when I'm reading, I would come across words every couple of pages that I'd need to look up, but it's a lot easier now with the internet. I've been learning Bulgarian for 10 years (she has a Bulgarian daughter-in-law) and have to look up a word on every line. I know that sounds a bit schoolmarmy.' Ní Dhuibhne has already done her bit to popularise reading in Irish by writing a bestselling series of crime novels as Gaeilge, beginning with Dúnmharú sa Daingean (Murder in Dingle). 'People told me they'd never read a book in Irish before and were surprised that they could.' Ní Dhuibhne is a most versatile author, having written more than 30 books, in both Irish and English, for children, adolescents and adults, spanning novels, short stories, plays, memoirs and literary criticism. Although her best-known work is probably The Dancers Dancing, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction (then known as the Orange Prize) in 2000, her preferred form is the short story. Prof Margaret Kelleher of UCD, in her introduction to the Ní Dhuibhne's Selected Stories (Blackstaff Press, 2023), praised 'their incisiveness and wry humour, and her keen eye for the incongruous and the familiar made strange'. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne at home in Dublin. 'My short stories are closer to my true personality.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill 'When I'm writing at my most serious and deepest, it's the short story,' Ní Dhuibhne says. 'When I'm writing for younger people, it's made up completely, although the stories do end up with something of you in them. My short stories are closer to my true personality. 'The short story is a focus on a moment of truth, when the veil of reality is lifted for a moment to reveal a deeper truth. Because it is short, it has a connection to time which is more controllable. Shelley described inspiration as like a spark to a coal, which begins to fade as soon as you start writing. With a novel it fades on day one and you have to keep rekindling it. With a short story it doesn't have time to fade. You can grab the energy of inspiration and get it drafted before it's gone. That's why short stories can achieve a sort of perfection it's almost impossible for a novel to achieve. [ Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is new Laureate for Irish Fiction Opens in new window ] 'The only guideline I like about short stories is that something has to happen to someone on the surface, a dramatic incident of some kind, and something has to happen underneath, an excavation, what the meaning of the story is.' And yet the short story is, for many readers, the poor relation to the novel. 'Readers like to get lost in a story, immersed,' Ni Dhuibhne says. 'They don't like dipping in and out, just getting to know a setting and the characters and then it's on to the next one.' That's why she feels long short stories are the most successful, more like short novels. The Dancers Dancing, a coming-of-age novel set in an Irish college in the Donegal Gaeltacht, that uniquely Irish rite of passage, grew out of a short story, Blood and Water, after Dolores Walsh, a fellow member of her writers' group, told her she could get a novel out of it. 'It's about a group of girls who go from Dublin to Irish college and it explores the relationship of the English- and Irish-speaking worlds, the urban-rural divide. My main character Orla is in a slightly challenging position. She is not a complete outsider as her mother's family is from that area, she has lots of relatives there and is ashamed of them. Old stories have a luminosity and beauty, a wildness of imagination that can be lacking in contemporary life — Éilís Ní Dhuibhne 'Orla doesn't yet accept the wholeness of her personality. This teenager is trying to navigate a way through middle-class Dublin life and this other side of her, poor Irish-speaking people in Donegal. That arose from my experience as a child and teenager. I aspired to be more upper class than we were. Quite a lot of my fiction explores the connection between past and present, our ancestry.' She is not sure she can describe her voice as a writer. 'Maybe I'd aspire to make it intimate, very gripping. I have quite a comic voice, I'm at home with irony.' Ní Dhuibhne has also spent many years teaching creative writing, at UCD, Trinity, Boston College and the Irish Writers Centre. Her pupils included Colin Barrett, Henrietta McKervey, Andrea Carter, Jamie O'Connell and Jessica Traynor. The new laureate has a rich literary social life, with a lot of writer friends. She has been in the same writing group for 40 years now with authors Catherine Dunne, Lia Mills and former minister of state Liz McManus, among others. It started as a national Irish women writers' workshop set up in 1985 by Eavan Boland, to address the underrepresentation of women's voices in Irish literature. Ní Dhuibhne studied folklore at university alongside English and is now president of the Folklore of Ireland society. The old stories are a big influence on her own writing. 'That is one of my characteristics. I often counterpoint contemporary, modern stories with a folk legend or tale. It gives a different dimension, a deepening.' Éilís Ní Dhuibhne at home in Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill The first time she did it was with Midwife to the Fairies, the story of a secret birth, in which a midwife goes to a fairy hill and assists with the birth of a child. The other inspiration was newspaper reports about the 1984 Kerry babies case. 'Perhaps it was a way the community had of telling reality in a coded way. I am a folklorist, I do it to offer an interpretation of the old story. On the other hand it gives depth and lustre to what might be a thin little story without it. Old stories have a luminosity and beauty, a wildness of imagination that can be lacking in contemporary life. These stories have survived for centuries because they have some attractive quality.' Ní Dhuibhne's Irish-language memoir, Fáínne Geal an Lae (Clo Iar Chonnacht 2023), tracks her childhood until the age of 12 in 1966. 'It ends on a very optimistic note with the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Rising. My sister and I were lucky with the time of our birth, just in time for free secondary education and grants for university. I wrote it during Covid when everyone was writing memoirs. My life was so different to my children's, I wanted to document it.' Her other memoir, Ten Thousand Days, addresses the death of her husband Bo in 2013, and their lives together. Was its purpose to process or record? 'In the first instance, the former, to process my feelings of devastation and grief at the loss of my husband, but also to record the story of our relationship. 'Bo's death was very difficult, traumatic and horrible. It does take some years, but gradually one gets back to being myself. I think of Bo and I miss him in various ways but I feel healed. Writing the book certainly helped me get through the first three or four years but the real healer is time.' [ 'Grief dissolves you. I could no longer sleep upstairs in our bed' Opens in new window ] Her grief was also channelled into two superb short stories, The Coast of Wales and New Zealand Flax, commissioned by Sinead Gleeson and Belinda McKeon respectively for anthologies. 'I couldn't write about anything else. That was the only thing I was thinking about. They are examples of stories I would not have written if I hadn't been invited to.' Ní Dhuibhne has had two great influences in her writing life, Canadian Alice Munro and Irish feminist and LGBTQ+ activist Ailbhe Smyth. Back in the 1980s, soon after she had married and had two children, Ní Dhuibhne joined a women's studies forum that Smyth had set up in UCD. 'She opened my eyes to cultural feminism, the facts of literary history, that there weren't as many women writers as there should be. I had been blind to the facts. I did English at UCD without realising we only read three women (Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte and Jane Austen) in three years. It was consciousness raising. 'I could have let writing go but it became more than a matter of self-expression or personal ambition. It seemed I was now part of a movement of women writers of Ireland. It took off and now we have gender equality in fiction. Women are no longer ignored. There is no way you could have a syllabus these days that excluded women.' Munro, the late Canadian author, 'showed me a way of writing about the past and connecting it to the present' through her stories about her ancestors. 'It definitely influenced Blood and Water. Before that, my stories were really corny, probably because I wasn't linking past and present, just taking my father's anecdotes and trying to transform them into literary stories.' Munro's mesmerising, intimate style pulled her right into the story and her protagonists' unpretentious lives. 'It seemed artless, though obviously was not at all. I loved her luminosity the way she handles time, the way her stories spread out and are not tight little stories focused on one thing. I learned a lot about composition from her.' A wry, dry humour is another of the laureate's trademarks. The Literary Lunch, a satire on self-serving members of an arts organisation dining for Ireland, is her most popular story. The Arts Council must have a sense of humour too. 'Perhaps they haven't read it,' she laughs. 'I know everyone thinks it is based on the Arts Council but it's not at all. It was inspired by another committee.' As well as the late English comic writer David Lodge and Samuel Beckett's bleakly comic novels, she was weaned on an Inter Cert anthology featuring Somerset Maugham and Saki. Finally, why should people read fiction? 'It's hard to answer that without sounding trite,' she says, 'but it is the best way of getting inside the head and heart and personality of other people, total empathy. I think that is its trump card in art. It's so entertaining, you're entering into the lives of other people. In fiction there is an intimacy of contact with humanity, it's psychologically insightful, it teaches you something.' Éilís Ní Dhuibhne will be in conversation with Niall MacMonagle at a free public event in the National Library, Dublin, on Tuesday, September 16th at 7pm.
Irish Times
18-07-2025
- Irish Times
Amanda Cassidy signs big book deal
In The Irish Times tomorrow, Michael Clune tells Tadhg Hoey about his debut novel Pan and his struggles with addiction; Éilís Ní Dhuibhne tells me about her appointment as the new Laureate for Irish Fiction; and there is a Q&A with Aisling Rawle about her debut novel, The Compound. Reviews are Mei Chin on Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens; Tart by Slutty Cheff; The Jackfruit Chronicles by Shahnaz Ahsan; Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever; Jimi Famurewa's Picky; and Strong Roots by Olia Hercules; Tony Clayton-Lea on the best new music books; Declan O'Driscoll on fiction in translation; Neil Hegarty on Tree Hunting: 1,000 Trees to Find in Britain and Ireland's Towns and Cities by Paul Wood; Maija Makela on Notes to John by Joan Didion; Lucy Sweeney Byrne on Beautiful Lives: How We Got Learning Disabilities So Wrong by Stephen Unwin; Ruby Eastwood on Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt; Michael Cronin on Seascraper by Benjamin Wood; Adrienne Murphy on The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colquhoun; Oliver Farry on A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine by Chris Hedges; and John Boyne on Speak to Me of Home by Jeanine Cummins. This weekend's Irish Times Eason offer is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, just €5.99, a €6 saving. Eason offer Amanda Cassidy has signed a big UK and US deal for her forthcoming novel, Beautiful Liars . It will be published as a lead title by Century (Penguin Random House) in the UK and by Putnam in the US, the same publisher behind Big Little Lies. Her latest novel, The Stranger Inside, is being published next month by Canelo. Century fiction publishing director Emily Griffin acquired World Rights to Beautiful Liars plus an untitled novel by the bestselling Irish crime writer Amanda Cassidy in a major pre-empt from Diana Beaumont at DHH Literary Agency. North American rights were acquired by executive editor Melanie Fried at Putnam, also in a major pre-empt. Beautiful Liars tells the story of an upscale Dublin community rocked by the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl, Saskia, who vanishes during a game of dares in the woods. As tension mounts, three mothers find themselves navigating their worst fears and darkest instincts to protect their children who were with Saskia the night she vanished. These are families who have always used wealth to shield their children from just about anything. Saskia's younger sister, Maude, is determined to find out what happened that terrible night, whatever the cost… Cassidy is an author, commissioning editor and former Sky News reporter. Her debut novel, Breaking , was shortlisted for the 2023 CWA John Creasey Dagger Award. Her third novel, The Perfect Place , was an instant Irish Times bestseller. Cassidy said: " Beautiful Liars began with my fascination for what really happens behind the closed doors of a seemingly privileged life – where parents will do almost anything to protect their children, especially when they have the means to make problems disappear. I grew up on bedtime stories of Irish folklore that always carried a hint of darkness, so that edge naturally finds its way into my novels. I'd walk the beach near my home in Dublin while sisters Saskia and Maude came alive in my mind. I feel incredibly lucky to have found the dream team at Century and Putnam who immediately understood the heart of this story, and I'm so excited to share it with readers everywhere." Griffin said: 'From the first page of Beautiful Liars I could feel a star quality in Amanda's writing – it is at once propulsive and thought-provoking and full of meaty talking points. Layer by layer, Amanda pulls back the secrets contained within a close-knit community as she explores how far people are prepared to go to protect those they love. Into this addictive narrative she cleverly weaves in Irish folklore and wolves to create a truly unforgettable reading experience. Readers who love Liane Moriarty and Tana French will find themselves instantly under the spell of this novel." Beautiful Liars will be published in spring 2027. * Longford County Library, Archives, Arts and Heritage Services has announced details of a new competition, Colum for Our Time. The competition is aimed at writers, artists or illustrators in both junior and senior categories. Writers are invited to produce a contemporary take on Padraic Colum's story The First Harp from his collection The Big Tree of Bunlahy, while artists are invited to create new illustrations for the story. The Big Tree of Bunlahy is a children's short story collection consisting of 13 stories. The title comes from a famous landmark in the village of Bunlahy, where Colum's aunt Anne lived. The junior category invites entries from 12-17 years and the senior category invites entries from those aged over 18 years. The winners will receive €250 each and they will be presented with their prizes at the Padraic Colum Gathering in Granard Community Library on October 4th. Entries should be submitted to libraryhqteam@ by midnight on August 31st. For more information, or to request the project brief, application form and a copy of the short story, please email libraryhqteam@ or call 043-3341124. * The third annual Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School will take place at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum in Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary, from September 17th-20th. The programme, whose theme is Political Theatre: Learning from the past? , includes talks and readings, scriptwriting workshops and an exhibition by North Tipperary Artists' Collective. Assistant Professor in the School of History, DCU, Dr Leeann Lane's keynote address is titled Hunger strike as republican performativity: Mary MacSwiney, Brixton, 1920, Mountjoy 1922, Kilmainham 1923. Williams Rossa Cole , great-grandson of O'Donovan Rossa, will introduce his film, Rebel Wife: The Story of Mary Jane O'Donovan Rossa, and take questions following the screening. James Moran , Professor of Modern English Literature and Drama at Nottingham University, will deliver a talk on The playwrights and 1916. The presentation will feature extracts from plays, including The Plough and the Stars . In their discussion Poetry and Politics: Plural Perspectives, Dr Ailbhe McDaid and Prof Eugene O'Brien , of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, will discuss how poets respond to different political events, and the symbolic (even theatrical) language of poetry to capture the past and current political upheavals. Tickets are available at this link . * The 2025 Forward Prizes for Poetry shortlists have been announced. Renowned for championing poetry at its most innovative, with new voices and internationally celebrated writers alike, the shortlists include British poet laureate Simon Armitage and, for the first time, BSL poetry from Raymond Antrobus and Zoë McWhinney. The Forward Prize for Best Collection (£10,000): I Sugar the Bones by Juana Adcock; Southernmost: Sonnets by Leo Boix; The Island in the Sound by Niall Campbell; Avidyā by Vidyan Ravinthiran; Wellwater by Karen Solie The Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000): Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali; Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi; Heirloom by Catherine-Esther Cowie; Altar by Desree; Goonie by Michael Mullen The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written (£1,000): At Least by Abeer Ameer; Birds of the Arctic by Simon Armitage; A Parliament of Jets by Tom Branfoot; Girl Ghosts by Tim Tim Cheng; Codex© by Nick Makoha The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed (£1,000): Dynamic Disks by Raymond Antrobus; Sikiliza by Bella Cox; Where I'm From by Griot Gabriel; Mum Does the Washing by Joshua Idehen; The portrait and the skylight by Zoë McWhinney
