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Irish Times
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- 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 Independent
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Madeleine Keane: Congratulations to the new Laureate for Irish fiction 2025-2028 Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, plus summer school season launches
Congratulations to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, who has been appointed Laureate for Irish Fiction 2025-2028 by the Arts Council. She follows in the distinguished footsteps of Colm Tóibín, Sebastian Barry, and inaugural Laureate, Anne Enright.
Irish Times
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is new Laureate for Irish Fiction
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is to be the new Laureate for Irish Fiction 2025-2028, the Arts Council has announced. The Laureate for Irish Fiction is an Arts Council initiative to honour an established Irish writer of fiction, nurture a new generation of writers, promote Irish literature nationally and internationally and encourage the public to engage with high-quality Irish fiction. The laureateship was most recently held by Colm Tóibín , following Sebastian Barry and the inaugural laureate, Anne Enright . 'The Arts Council is very proud to award Éilís Ní Dhuibhne the honour of Laureate for Irish Fiction from 2025 to 2028,' its chair, Maura McGrath, said. 'Her novels and short stories, published in both English and Irish, have rightly earned her critical acclaim and a devoted readership. We know she will bring remarkable vitality and deep understanding to the role, building on the great work of her predecessors.' READ MORE Mariella Frostrup, a member of the international selection panel, said: 'I'm so excited by the appointment of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. It's a welcome opportunity to acknowledge and highlight a remarkable writing career, encompassing short stories, novels and non-fiction, and also to celebrate her valuable contribution to Gaelic via her bilingual prose. 'Her short stories, novels and non-fiction profoundly speak to the female experience while dealing with universal themes of aspiration, disappointment, love, jealousy, hope and human inadequacy – often with a hefty ladle of humour thrown in! 'As a teacher of creative writing, she's shown a deft ability to inspire writers and readers alike, adding to her credentials for this new public-facing role. I'm delighted that her wonderful books will now be introduced to an even wider audience and very much looking forward to the programme of activity that she will lead during her term as laureate.' Ní Dhuibhne said: 'I am absolutely delighted, very pleasantly surprised, and highly honoured to be offered the Laureateship in Irish Fiction. I feel lucky. Why me? Many writers deserve the accolade. 'So, after the first stunned few days, I am considering how to be an active and creative Laureate. Writing is something you do in privacy and solitude of course, but it always has an obvious public face. It moves from the inside of the writer's head, from their room or laptop or whatever, to the book or the screen. It's published. [ The best books for summer 2025: our critics' top picks Opens in new window ] 'And while the actual writing is a 'solitary' task, it generally has a social aspect in the more regular sense. Writers belong to their own community, and to the community of writers. All my life I have been meeting writers at book launches, classes, festivals, and in the writers' group I've belonged to for almost 40 years.' The overarching theme of her laureateship will be 'The Island of Imagination', exploring the question, 'What makes a good story?', as well as celebrating fiction in the Irish language and other European languages. She will be in conversation with Niall MacMonagle at a free public event in the National Library, Dublin, on September 16th at 7pm. Details will be published shortly on the Arts Council's website . Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin. Author of more than 30 books, her work includes the novels The Dancers Dancing; The Shelter of Neighbours; Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow; Hurlamaboc; Dordán; and Cailíní Beaga Ghleann na Blath, among others. She has published seven collections of short stories. Her most recent books are Twelve Thousand Days: A Memoir (shortlisted for the Michel Déon Award, 2020); Selected Stories (Blackstaff, 2023); Fáínne Geal an Lae (Clo Iar Chonnacht, 2023); Look! It's a Woman Writer! (Arlen House, 2021); and Well! You Don't Look It! Essays by Irish Women Writers on Ageing (Salmon, 2024). [ Éilís Ní Dhuibhne on the best Irish language books of 2025 so far Opens in new window ] She has received the Pen Award for an Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature, a Hennessy Hall of Fame Award, many Oireachtas Awards for her writing in Irish, and the Stuart Parker Award for Drama. The Dancers Dancing was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women's Prize for Fiction) in 2000. She has written many scholarly articles on folklore and literary topics, and is a regular book reviewer for The Irish Times. In autumn 2020 she held the prestigious Burns Scholarship at Boston College. She is a member of Aosdána, and president of the Folklore of Ireland Society.
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Brooklyn and beyond: Colm Tóibín's best books – ranked!
This dispatch from what we might call the extended Colm Tóibín universe is set near the same time and in the same place as his earlier novel Brooklyn (one character appears in both books). It's the story of a widowed woman who struggles to cope with life after love. If it lacks the drama of some of Tóibín's other novels, the style is impeccable as ever, with irresistibly clean prose that reports emotional turmoil masked by restraint. There is no ornate showing off. 'People used to tease me for it, saying: 'Could you write a longer sentence?'' Tóibín has said. 'But there's nothing I can do about it.' This short novel began as a play, which later became a Broadway flop. Tourists, observed Tóibín, are 'going to take in only one Broadway show, and Bette Midler had just opened around the corner'. Jesus's mother Mary is recalling the events around his crucifixion. Tóibín's Mary is not meek and mild, but hardened by her experience, suspicious of his miracles and despairing of the followers who will take her son away from her. This is a rare first-person narrative for Tóibín, and his quiet style sometimes muffles the emotions Mary feels at Jesus's suffering. In the end it's a book not just about biblical figures, but about how strange our children become to us. Tóibín's second novel shows that his 'deadpan' style was there from the start: 'you're never sure where the laughter is going to come from or where the sadness is', as he described it to the Paris Review. There's more sadness here than laughter – apart from the joke that it always seems to be raining. It's the story of High Court judge Eamon Redmond, a conservative man in 1980s Ireland, where the next generation – including his children – is agitating for reform on social issues such as divorce and abortion. This book is also, says Tóibín, 'the most direct telling of the grief and numbness' he felt as a child at his 'abandonment' when his mother left the family for many months to attend his sick father in hospital. Tóibín's motto might be: If it's not one thing, it's your mother. Redoubtable mothers loom large in his work, and this is a whole book of stories about mothers and their sons. The best are novella-length – Tóibín is a novelist at heart – including one which features early appearances of Nancy and Jim from Brooklyn. These are stories of complicated love, laced with dark comedy. In one, a gangster with a drunken mother is selling stolen paintings to two Dutch criminals. One of the men, his associate tells him, 'could kill you in one second with his bare hands'. 'Which of them?' he asks. 'That's the problem,' comes the reply. 'I don't know.' If Tóibín's fiction tends toward low-key gloom, this novel about a gay Argentinian man of English ancestry is his happiest. Richard Garay frequently enjoys himself, especially now that his mother is dead. There's a gusto in his resentment of her ('I am using, with particular relish, the heavy cotton sheets she was saving for some special occasion') and an animal delight in his appreciation of the bodies of the men he loves. Even the darker stuff here – abductions, the fallout of the Falklands war – is described with almost cheerful energy. It catapulted Tóibín from acclaimed literary novelist to bestseller, with the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman in 1950s Ireland who seems utterly passive in her life. At least, that is, until she goes to the US – the sea crossing is a comic highlight, featuring motion sickness and a shared bathroom – and defies her family's plans for her. Tóibín's sensitive touch means Eilis feels like a real person, even when we want to give her a good shake. Adapted into a film in 2015 starring Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn delivers satisfying emotional tension despite its restrained heroine. It's little wonder it has become Tóibín's best-loved book. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Last year's sequel to Brooklyn takes up Eilis's story 20 years on. It's a more rounded novel, with a greater range of characters fully on display, and Eilis seems to have found some bottle in the intervening years. 'Can you not control her?' her brother-in-law asks her husband, when she argues with their father. It's also a portrait of a changing Ireland in the 1970s. And although Tóibín dislikes traditional historical fiction ('I hate people 'capturing the period''), he does capture the period beautifully, with a wealth of detail – including the introduction of the toasted cheese sandwich to Ireland's pubs. Tóibín's fourth novel is clear, contained and complex. It is set in his literary comfort zone of coastal County Wexford, but there's nothing complacent about this story, where traditional Ireland – singalongs with bodhrán drums – meets the modern crisis of Aids. It tells of three generations of women trying to get along together as a young man in their family dies. But it is also an acutely observed portrait of parenting young children (more mothers and sons), a retelling of the Greek myth of Orestes, Electra and Clytemnestra, and a rendering of Tóibín's own childhood suffering around the sickness and death of his father. 'I think if you're not working, as a novelist, from some level of subconscious pain,' he has said, 'then a thinness will get into your book.' Tóibín's longest novel is also one of his most gripping. This book about Thomas Mann is an exceptional achievement in imaginative empathy, covering six decades of the writer's life: his self-regard, his literary genius, and the concealed love for beautiful young men that he subsumed into works such as Death in Venice. Tóibín shows Mann as calcified by his public austerity (at his mother's funeral, his daughter sees him cry for the first time). Tóibín likes to poke fun at his own austere reputation. He writes, he once said, on a chair that is 'one of the most uncomfortable ever made. After a day's work, it causes pain in parts of the body you did not know existed' – but 'it keeps me awake'. Tóibín's masterpiece – to date – explores the inner life of Henry James, a man who was 'a mass of ambiguities'. The novel covers five years in James's life, beginning with the failure of his 1895 play Guy Domville, but its scope is vast, teasing apart the public and private man. 'Everyone he knew carried within them the aura of another life which was half secret and half open, to be known about but not mentioned.' James loves gossip and secrets but keeps his own hidden. 'It was the closest he had come,' he recalls, thinking of one abandoned episode of attraction to another man, 'but he had not come close at all.' The Master is subtle, funny, ingenious and emotionally wrenching. Tóibín even took enough influence from James to – finally – write in long sentences. To explore any of the books featured, visit Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Independent
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Declan Lynch: ‘This was the worst 'take' in all of human history, so it's no harm to hear it refuted by a Joe O'Connor'
Radio reviews Last week I was pointing out that the best thing on the radio these days is Culture File: The Comfort Zone on Lyric FM, presented by Luke Clancy. I mentioned in particular the contributions of writer Colm Tóibín. Now it turns out that the next best thing on the radio last week was the contribution of Joseph O'Connor on Brendan O'Connor (RTÉ1, weekends, 11am), in which the writer talked about the year 1975 as the most crucial in popular music.
