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Award winning author set to host Donegal fiction competition
Award winning author set to host Donegal fiction competition

Irish Independent

time2 days ago

  • Entertainment
  • Irish Independent

Award winning author set to host Donegal fiction competition

The 2025 Allingham Festival will take place in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal from November 5 to 9. Headline events will include a keynote speech by human rights activist Nelofer Pazira, a performance of The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong starring Don Wycherley, and an interview with broadcaster John Creedon. Nuala O'Connor will judge the entries in the 2025 Allingham Flash Fiction Competition. Judge Nuala O'Connor's sixth novel Seaborne about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards, and it was nominated for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award. She won the Irish Short Story of the Year Award at the 2022 Irish Book Awards, and her novel Nora was selected as the One Dublin One Book choice for that year. Menagerie, her fifth poetry collection, has been published by Arlen House. Alongside her judging duties, Naula will also interview award-winning author Donal Ryan at the festival. Donal Ryan, winner of the 2025 Orwell Prize for his novel Heart, Be at Peace, will be at the Allingham Festival on Saturday afternoon 8 Nov in the Abbey Centre. The 2025 Allingham Poetry and Flash Fiction Competitions are open for entries through September 28, 2025. Details and tickets for all events, including the Literary Lunch and the Donal Ryan interview, will be available through the Festival website. Winning entries will be announced and read at the Literary Lunch on Saturday, November 8.

Alvy Carragher and Ali Choudhary win Eavan Boland Award 2025
Alvy Carragher and Ali Choudhary win Eavan Boland Award 2025

Irish Times

time01-08-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Irish Times

Alvy Carragher and Ali Choudhary win Eavan Boland Award 2025

In the Irish Times tomorrow, Prof Paige Reynolds, curator of a new exhibition at MoLI celebrating Irish romance fiction, champions this much maligned genre and shares a list of her favourites. And there is a Q&A with Joseph Birchall about his debut thriller In Plain Sight. Reviews are Eamon Sweeney on Bless Me Father: A Life Story by Kevin Rowland & The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership that Rocked the World by Peter Guralnick; Daniel Geary on Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus; Neasa MacErlean on The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner; Claire Hennessy on the best new YA fiction; Julia Kelly on My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud; Adam Wyeth on Groundwater by Thomas McMullan; Des McMahon on The Mind Electric: Stories of the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains by Pria Anand; Tom Boland on AC Grayling's Discriminations; Pat Carty on Unbroken: Secrets, Lies and Enduring Love by Mary Attenborough & Michael Gallagher; Sinéad Mac Aodha on The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey; Éilís Ní Dhuibhne on Gratefully & Affectionately: Mary Lavin & The New Yorker by Grainne Hurley; John Gallagher on Mary Beth Norton, 'I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer': Letters on Love & Marriage from the World's First Personal Advice Column; Rachel Andrews on The Work We Need by Hilary Cottam; and Andrew Lynch on Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Kemp. This weekend's Irish Times Eason offer is Heart be at Peace by Donal Ryan, just €5.99, a €6 saving. Eason offer Alvy Carragher and Ali Choudhary have won the Eavan Boland Award 2025, Poetry Ireland has announced. Founded in 2021 to honour the poet's legacy, the award supports poets through mentorship and cross-border residencies. Eavan Boland championed diversity and new voices, stating that 'the margin re-defines the centre'. This award reflects her vision for a vibrant, inclusive poetry community. The award invited early-career poets based in the UK and mid-career poets based in Ireland to apply for the bursary in addition to a residency at the Trinity College Dublin and University of Manchester as well as further development opportunities in 2026, all of which comprise the award. Supported by Poetry Ireland, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Trinity College Dublin (TCD), the University of Manchester, and the British Council Ireland, this biennial award celebrates creativity, connection, and cross-border exchange in poetry. Choudhary is a writer, poet and multi-disciplinary artist exploring the poetics of violence and intimacy. He is an Emerging Creative Associate at New Writing North for 2025 and was shortlisted for the Tempest Prize. His limited-edition chapbook, Night of the Fire, was published by Ethel Zine & Micro Press in May. He will be based at TCD School of English for two weeks in November. Carragher is based in Dublin. She grew up in Galway and Tipperary and has since lived in Louisiana, Dublin, South Korea, and Canada. She has published three books of poetry: What Remains the Same (Gallery Press) which was shortlisted for the Farmgate National Poetry Award in 2025, The Men I Keep Under My bed (Salmon Poetry), and Falling In Love With Broken Things (Salmon Poetry). She will spend two weeks in October as a resident at the University of Manchester Centre for New Writing. She will take part in seminars and workshops in the Centre for New Writing and will have access to the John Rylands Library where Eavan Boland's archive is located. She will also engage with Carcanet Press while in Manchester. Selectors of this year's Eavan Boland awardees were Prof John McAuliffe (Manchester) and Dr Rachael Hegarty (Dublin). * Celebrating its 15th anniversary, the UK and Ireland's only dedicated prize for LGBTQ+ literature has announced its 2025 longlists for the Polari Book Prize and Polari First Book Prize, celebrating a wealth of genres and forms, including poetry, memoir, crime and thriller, and romantasy. This year's longlists include highly acclaimed titles, including John Boyne's novella Earth , the second book in his new series The Elements. Two-time Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst is also longlisted for his latest novel Our Evenings , alongside the new landmark work Like Water Like Sea by Olumide Popoola. Lauded debut novels are also nominated, including Isaac by Curtis Garner, Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg and Mongrel by Hanako Footman. The shortlists will be announced in late September, and the winners will be announced at a ceremony on Thursday, November 27th at the British Library. In celebration of its 15th anniversary, Arts Council England is funding the Polari Prize 15th Birthday Showcase, a live platform for LGBTQ+ writers featuring previous winners and nominees, local writers and new emerging voices. There will be over 30 events in total across 2025. * The Irish Writers Centre in collaboration with Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, supported by Dublin City Council, has launched the first episode of its new six-part video series Dublin, One City, Many Stories . It features Joseph O'Connor, Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick, in conversation with Madeleine Keane, reflecting on the places, people and experiences that shaped his writing life. Filmed at the LexIcon Library and the James Joyce Tower & Museum in Dun Laoghaire, the episode sees O'Connor, an Irish Writers Centre ambassador, retrace the roots of his literary imagination. He speaks movingly of childhood walks through Dublin's storied streets, of libraries as sanctuaries, and of a deep connection to the voices that echo through Irish literary history. 'The hometown of a writer becomes part of the DNA,' says O'Connor. 'And I'm blessed that Dún Laoghaire is the place where I grew up. A coast-town has stories and glories, tides and ghosts, comings and goings, a bit of grit beneath the fingernails. From the pier and the Martello tower – if walls could talk – they'd tell secrets. I'm honoured to be interviewed for this series and I'm very proud to be an Ambassador for the Irish Writers Centre. I wish it had been there when I was starting as a writer and I'm delighted it's there today.' The video is now available to watch on the Irish Writers Centre website . The series of six videos continues monthly, showcasing more than 20 writers who reflect the depth and diversity of Ireland's literary landscape, including Suad Aldarra, John Banville, Ciara Ní É, Marian Keyes, Nandi Jola, Neil Jordan, Victoria Kennefick, Gustav Parker Hibbitt, Mike McCormack and more. The series celebrates 15 years of Dublin's designation as a UNESCO City of Literature. * Bookselling Ireland, the committee of Booksellers Association members representing bookshops big and small from across Ireland, together with Publishing Ireland, has announced details for this year's Irish Book Week campaign, which will run from Saturday, October 18th to 25th. This year's campaign ambassadors are children's illustrator, Mel Carroll, who also designed the beautiful artwork for this year's campaign; Cork author, Patrick Holloway; historical fiction writer, Cauvery Madhavan; novelist Sheila O'Flanagan; and children's author, Máire Zepf. Now in its eighth year, Irish Book Week is a nationwide celebration of Irish bookshops, Irish books, publishers, writers, illustrators, and poets. The campaign aims to encourage people from across Ireland to shop local & shop Irish by visiting their local bookshops to discover and enjoy a range of exciting and interesting events, readings, parties, displays and much more. * To mark the publication of Our London Lives in paperback, Atlantic Books is reissuing four Christine Dwyer Hickey backlist titles in matching livery, including The Narrow Land (winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction) and The Cold Eye of Heaven (winner of the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award). These four titles will be published on August 7th, each priced at £9.99. Dwyer Hickey was born in Dublin and is a novelist and short story writer. Her novel The Narrow Land won two major prizes: the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award. 2020 also saw her 2004 novel Tatty chosen for UNESCO's Dublin One City One Book promotion. Her work has been widely translated into European and Arabic languages. She is an elected member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of arts. * Write By the Sea Literary Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary this September 26th-28th with a vibrant programme of readings, talks, and workshops in the coastal village of Kilmore Quay. The festival opens Friday evening with an appearance by Claire Keegan. Saturday's line-up includes Joseph O'Connor, Roisín O'Donnell, Nuala O'Connor, Niamh Garvey, Sarah Moss, Lisa Harding, Dermot Bolger Mary O'Donnell, and Claire Hennessy. Colum McCann appears in conversation with journalist Lara Marlowe. Jan Carson joins Garrett Carr to discuss his acclaimed debut novel. David Butler leads a fiction seminar, part of a full programme of workshops and masterclasses. The day ends with a special evening of poetry and music from Paula Meehan and Declan O'Rourke. Sunday blends fresh voices with established names. Debut novelists June O'Sullivan and Patrick Holloway present their work. Wendy Erskine and Donal Ryan discuss their recent novels. Kit de Waal and Christine Dwyer Hickey speak with Dr Richard Hayes, followed by appearances from John Banville and Victoria Kennefick. Poets Jennifer Horgan and Karen J McDonnell also feature. Eimear McBride joins Mike McCormack, and Theo Dorgan is interviewed by philosopher Richard Kearney. The festival closes with Marian Keyes in conversation with Sophie White. Weekend passes €145; day passes €80. * Simon & Schuster UK is to publish Sarah Crossan's new book, a YA thriller in verse, next February. Gone for Good has been described as Girl in Pieces meets One of Us is Lying, set against the backdrop of America's controversial Troubled Teen industry. Connie Ryder is taken from her home in the dead of night and sent to Silver Lake Academy – a remote, high-security facility for 'troubled' teens. At Silver Lake, the vulnerable and the violent are locked in together under a brutal regime that aims to improve their behaviour. But when Connie learns she's been given the bed of a missing girl named Belle, she is drawn deep into a chilling web of secrets and lies. Crossan has won many prizes including the prestigious CILIP Carnegie Medal, the CBI Book of the Year, the YA Book Prize, and the CLiPPA Poetry Award.

Donal Ryan: ‘I'm still learning about class in Ireland ... and the tribes that exist'
Donal Ryan: ‘I'm still learning about class in Ireland ... and the tribes that exist'

Irish Times

time29-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Irish Times

Donal Ryan: ‘I'm still learning about class in Ireland ... and the tribes that exist'

Donal Ryan had just been longlisted for the Booker Prize for his debut novel The Spinning Heart . So: he couldn't help himself. The jubilant author turned on his computer in 2013 and wrote an email pointing out this detail to the literary agent who had just issued him with a generic rejection to say she was not interested in representing him. 'She didn't reply. It was a pyrrhic victory for me,' Ryan laughs. Then a doubtful expression crosses his face. 'I shouldn't have bothered. I regret it.' Humble and unpretentious by nature, Ryan has a habit of worrying about things he has said or done, even and perhaps especially at moments of greatest glory. We're talking today because the Tipperary-born author has added another trophy to his crowded mantelpiece: the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for his novel Heart, Be at Peace . But Ryan looks anxious when he joins me on a video call from his books-strewn office in the University of Limerick , where he serves as a lecturer in creative writing. It's partly because of the attention now coming his way. 'I find interviews so hard,' he says. 'After this interview is finished, I'll be worried and feel sick and find it hard to sleep.' Does a monologue play out in his head about what he's doing right or wrong? 'It never stops,' Ryan nods. 'Some days I look forward to being asleep so I can make it stop.' READ MORE If Ryan (49) is a fretter, so too are his remarkable, profound characters. Heavy emotions play out in the interior lives of Ryan's fictional creations: shame, grief, anger loom large, along with a desire to tell the truth. Whether it's lonely, bewildered Johnsey in The Thing About December or fragile, observant Lampy in From a Low and Quiet Sea, there's a ring of flinty authenticity to them and a captivating poetry. Ryan suffered through 47 rejections before he succeeded in getting The Spinning Heart published in 2012, but once it was in the world, readers recognised it for what it was: a book containing deep truths. Where other Irish authors had been setting their fiction back through the decades, perhaps to avoid the inchoate mess of the Celtic Tiger boom-to-bust, Ryan, based in Castletroy in Limerick, shone his torchlight directly on to the subject of what Irish banks did to Irish people. Narrated via 21 perspectives in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, characters offered insights about what it felt like to live on ghost estates; to buckle beneath the weight of crippling mortgages and uncertain futures. The book was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian First Book Award. Its sequel, Heart, Be at Peace, which returns us to their lives a decade on, has already won Novel of the Year at the 2024 Irish Book Awards and now, in netting the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, has triumphed over books from authors including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dream Count), Robert Harris (Precipice) and Elif Shafak (There are Rivers in the Sky). Until recently, you would have to look into dark corners to see drug dealing. Now it's very open. Close to my house there are dealers operating Ryan is grateful to win awards but he struggles with them too. 'They're weird, awards, because if you win, you feel a bit guilty for winning,' he says. 'If you win an award, it means other people on the shortlist have to not win it. Some of them are far more politically astute and engaged than I am. Elif Shafak is an amazing writer; she's been on trial in Turkey – she has suffered, she has been persecuted by her own government for her art. Elif is writing fiction at great personal risk. [ Donal Ryan: 'Stop apologising for yourself,' is one of the last things my mother said to me Opens in new window ] 'I'm lucky enough to live in this lovely free country where you can express yourself for the most part without fear of censure or arrest. I've never lived anywhere except north Tipp and east Limerick, Limerick city. So in one way, I'm the last person who should be writing fiction that has any kind of universal effect. But the thing is, I do believe that no matter how specific a demotic voice is, the way people think about themselves and the world around them doesn't vary much. What's generated from within us is similar for all human beings.' He adds: 'I suppose it's true that as Toni Morrison says, all art is political.' Sometimes the political act is to draw attention to invisibility. When Ryan began publishing, he tapped into a vein of Irish life that was both instantly recognisable and markedly different – these were characters so familiar you'd half-expect to step outside your house and spot them and yet they seemed to barely exist elsewhere in Irish fiction. 'When I first sat down to write The Spinning Heart, I just had Irish rural working people in mind. That's never gone away,' he says. 'They're the background and foreground of everything I do. That's who I am myself. I speak to my own people all the time, at the back of my head.' [ Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan: 'Companion' novel to The Spinning Heart is a welcome return Opens in new window ] Growing up in Tipperary, Ryan wasn't conscious of class divisions. He had an idyllic childhood with his parents and brother and sister in the village of Newtown. 'It was paradise,' he says. 'There was fun contained in every blade of grass. Everybody seemed to chat all the time. And everybody seemed to do the same kinds of jobs. All the dads were plumbers and labourers and carpenters. I wouldn't have known the word egalitarian, but it seemed to me that everybody where I grew up was the same. I think that's why class is portrayed starkly in my fiction, because I was shocked into such a keen awareness of it. I'm still learning as I go along about class in Ireland, the class system and the various tribes that exist.' Author Donal Ryan: 'They're weird, awards, because if you win, you feel a bit guilty for winning.' Photograph: Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images Before he became a prize-winning novelist in his 30s, Ryan was a labour inspector for the National Employment Rights Authority, where he was tasked with investigating regulatory offences by employers. What he found made him deeply aware of the gaps and inequities in the system, and how people could so easily become trapped by their circumstances. 'We used to visit language schools [in Ireland] advertising in Bangladesh for people to come and pay €2,000 for stamping their visa and an enrolment in a college. There'd be a few PCs and empty rooms and a couple of people hanging around who were meant to be lecturers. It was incredible. But nobody was breaking the law. They'd say, 'Oh the students are on a day off today or it's a holiday week.'' It's a scene revisited in Heart, Be at Peace, when one of the characters, Pokey Burke, is involved in setting up a dubious language school in Limerick city. Pokey is also involved in the drug scene and as he rises, other characters falter, worn down from debts, poor decision-making or the whiplash of negative social bias. 'People think they know the worth of your soul because of your clothes or bearing, these sudden judgments. We all do it.' It's part of the hidden Ireland Ryan keeps lifting a stone to examine. 'Until recently, you would have to look into dark corners to see drug dealing. Now it's very open. Close to my house there are dealers operating,' he says. [ What do Irish writers read? Donal Ryan, Mark Tighe, Nuala O'Connor, Claire Hennessy and more give recommendations Opens in new window ] It was Ryan's mother Anne who inspired him to write the sequel to The Spinning Heart. She had worked in Tesco in Nenagh and would sit on the till fielding questions about The Spinning Heart to customers anxious to find out what happened to characters like Pokey Burke and Bobby Mahon. They'd even get her to autograph the book. She died in 2023, after a diagnosis of breast cancer, six years after the sudden death of his father. Their deaths have hit Ryan hard. 'You realise how much you need them,' he says. 'How much you need that beautiful anchor, that lovely, predictable heaviness at the backbone of your life. I expected them to be there until 100, to have these two people in my life. My mam was only 71. It didn't feel like it was her time to die. She had so much to say and she was so full of energy and love.' His new novel, his ninth book, which he is just finishing, deals with grief. 'It's about a young man who loses his parents. It centres on that young lad's emotions and how grief affects him. When you don't confront grief properly, it can have strange effects on your psyche and your being, sometimes in a literal way, like on your skin or that sudden sweaty panic. The so-called ordinary loss, the loss of your parents, still has this terrible effect on you. And sometimes a discovery about a person you love, something you didn't know about them, can have the most profound, earth-shattering effect, so I explore those elements in the novel.' Ryan has drawn immense comfort from his wife Anne Marie, his most dedicated reader, who has suffered serious health issues. How is she doing? 'She's great. She's been through so much. She's had cancer twice. She really got beaten down the second time. Chemo is so hard. She's come through it. She's so positive.' [ Donal Ryan short story: 'He turned away from the beast, but the smell of death remained' Opens in new window ] Ryan met Anne Marie on a picket line when he was 28, when both were trade union activists with the Civil Public and Services Union. She encouraged him to pursue his dream of writing fiction, she would chase him up the stairs to write. So much stems from Anne Marie; her faith, her encouragement, her ability to delicately critique his work. 'Everything is written with her in mind. She's my first reader.' Anne Marie may soon need to give their teenage children Thomas and Lucy important tips about Ryan's fiction. 'The Spinning Heart is back on the Leaving Cert syllabus just in time for Thomas to have to do it for the Leaving Cert,' the author says. 'The poor créatúr. I don't know whether or not that'll encourage him into a writing career.' If either of his children opt for that route, they may find one day themselves facing their father in the University of Limerick in his role as a creative writing lecturer, where he does his best to encourage his students, who are 'on thin emotional ice' to keep their faith in themselves. As spells-maker Lily puts it in Heart, Be at Peace: 'Belief itself is a kind of magic. You can do things that seem impossible if you believe truly and with your whole heart.' Ryan offers a smile when I quote the lines back at him. You get the impression it's a sentiment he has carried with him his whole life, and which nourishes him even during those times, like now, when he finds the sideshow of publicity or the fear of judgment by others stressful. 'There's no way of patrolling how people interpret what you say and how people receive your work,' he says. 'You issue a blank contract when you write something, and the terms can't be negotiated or dictated by you. All you can do is tell your story the best way you can.'

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