Latest news with #LiadanNíChuinn
Irish Examiner
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
New Irish writer getting rave reviews — but nobody knows who they are
What's in a pen name? Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn's debut short story collection, Every One Still Here, is receiving rave reviews and rapturous praise, but hardly anyone seems to know who they are. A cursory Google turns up no photos or biographical information. All we know is that the writer is Northern Irish and was born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday agreement. A statement from Irish publisher The Stinging Fly reads: 'The Stinging Fly has been working with Liadan on these stories for the past four years. From early on in the process, they expressed a desire to publish their work under a pseudonym and to protect their privacy throughout the publication process. No photographs of the author are available and Liadan will not be participating in any in-person interviews or public events.' Writing anonymously or under a pseudonym is a long-established custom in publishing. Jane Austen's novels were attributed to 'a Lady', Mary Ann Evans went by George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters were Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Although women no longer need to disguise themselves as men, and 'the low trade of writing novels' is less stigmatised, the tradition of the pen name has continued throughout the 20th century into the present day: John Le Carré was really David Cornwell; Eric Blair became George Orwell; and no one has heard of Erika Leonard, but everyone has heard of EL James. When questions regarding the veracity of nature memoir The Salt Path caused outrage among the nation's book groups, the fact that the author had changed her and her husband's names was the least remarkable revelation. If anything, it can feel more unusual to meet an author whose books have the name they were born with on the cover. In the modern publishing world, the spectrum encompasses everything from 'uses a pen name but has an author photo and gives interviews' to 'has an opposite gender or gender-neutral author persona'; 'uses different pseudonyms for different genres'; 'uses a different name for political reasons, eg to escape persecution in their home country, or personal or professional reasons'; and even 'secret anonymity' (is anonymous but tries to make it so that no one actually knows they are). Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn Nepotist offspring will often use a less famous parent's surname to stave off accusations that they owe their success to their connections or, as in the case of AS Byatt, an author may use their married name to distance themselves from a novelist sibling (Margaret Drabble). Total anonymity, however, is a different business. The most famous modern example we have is of course Elena Ferrante (or it was, until she was possibly and, to my mind, very rudely unmasked by an Italian journalist). Yet even Ferrante did some press through correspondence, including writing for The Guardian. To not give interviews at all, especially as a young debut author, is unusual indeed, particularly in a publishing landscape where 'personal brand' is key, and short stories remain such a hard sell. You could say that Liadan Ní Chuinn's collection being published at all is something of a miracle. Literary quality is not always prioritised above profile. I cannot tell you how many proofs I am sent by writers who are big on Instagram but can't string a grammatical sentence together. With publicity budgets not what they used to be and many authors needing to do much of the work themselves, a debut writer who won't give interviews or attend events represents a challenge to any acquiring publishing house and their publicity department. I admire Ní Chuinn. As an author myself — in the next six months I have two books coming out — I know that the stress of exposure and the risk of burnout can be very real. Ní Chuinn could be forgiven for looking at Sally Rooney, another writer in the same literary ecosystem who started young, and thinking that level of exposure looks unappealing. The way a young woman — because it's usually a young woman — who creates something great becomes a sort of shorthand for everything that is wrong/right about her chosen art form is hardly an incentive to put yourself out there. Rooney's writing shows a deep ambivalence about fame, and her decision to now largely only put herself forward in the media when it serves her impassioned political beliefs is to be admired. Yet newspapers are still terribly prone to what I call 'Rooney-itis'. Look, I'm doing it now. When you're an author, public exposure doesn't just affect you, but the people in your life whose stories often overlap with yours. When you are writing about sensitive topics that have a lasting, painful legacy on real people's lives — as Ní Chuinn does in their excavation of the murderous legacy of English colonialism in Ireland — it can be an act of care and protection to remove yourself from the spotlight. Most of all, it makes the interaction between author and reader purely about the quality of the work. For a publisher to agree to publish an anonymous author, as so many did Ferrante, and publishers in Ireland, Britain, and the US have Ní Chuinn, that writer has to be extraordinary. And Ní Chuinn is. It should give any avid reader of fiction — and any author who cares about sentences but is rubbish at TikTok — hope. The work can still be the thing, at least sometimes. — The Guardian
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A new Irish writer is getting rave reviews – but nobody knows who they are. That gives me hope
What's in a pen name? Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn's debut short story collection, Every One Still Here, is receiving rave reviews and rapturous praise, but hardly anyone seems to know who they are. A cursory Google turns up no photos or biographical information. All we know is that the writer is Northern Irish and was born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday agreement. A statement from Irish publisher The Stinging Fly reads: 'The Stinging Fly has been working with Liadan on these stories for the past four years. From early on in the process, they expressed a desire to publish their work under a pseudonym and to protect their privacy throughout the publication process. No photographs of the author are available and Liadan will not be participating in any in-person interviews or public events.' Writing anonymously or under a pseudonym is a long-established custom in publishing. Jane Austen's novels were attributed to 'a Lady', Mary Ann Evans went by George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters were Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Although women no longer need to disguise themselves as men, and 'the low trade of writing novels' is less stigmatised, the tradition of the pen name has continued throughout the 20th century into the present day: John Le Carré was really David Cornwell; Eric Blair became George Orwell; and no one has heard of Erika Leonard, but everyone has heard of EL James. When questions regarding the veracity of nature memoir The Salt Path caused outrage among the nation's book groups, the fact that the author had changed her and her husband's names was the least remarkable revelation. If anything, it can feel more unusual to meet an author whose books have the name they were born with on the cover. In the world of modern publishing, the spectrum encompasses everything from 'uses a pen name but has an author photo and gives interviews' to 'has an opposite gender or gender-neutral author persona'; 'uses different pseudonyms for different genres'; 'uses a different name for political reasons, eg to escape persecution in their home country, or personal or professional reasons'; and even 'secret anonymity' (is anonymous but tries to make it so that no one actually knows they are). Nepotist offspring will often use a less famous parent's surname to stave off accusations that they owe their success to their connections or, as in the case of AS Byatt, an author may use their married name to distance themselves from a novelist sibling (Margaret Drabble). Total anonymity, however, is a different business. The most famous modern example we have is of course Elena Ferrante (or it was, until she was possibly and, to my mind, very rudely unmasked by an Italian journalist). Yet even Ferrante did some press through correspondence, including writing for the Guardian. To not give interviews at all, especially as a young debut author, is unusual indeed, and especially in a publishing landscape where 'personal brand' is key, and short stories remain such a hard sell. You could say that Liadan Ní Chuinn's collection being published at all is something of a miracle. Literary quality is not always prioritised above profile. I cannot tell you how many proofs I am sent by writers who are big on Instagram but can't string a grammatical sentence together. With publicity budgets not what they used to be and many authors needing to do much of the work themselves, a debut writer who won't give interviews or attend events represents a challenge to any acquiring publishing house and their publicity department. I admire Ní Chuinn. As an author myself – in the next six months I have two books coming out – I know that the stress of exposure and the risk of burnout can be very real. Ní Chuinn could be forgiven for looking at Sally Rooney, another writer in the same literary ecosystem who started young, and thinking that level of exposure looks unappealing. The way a young woman – because it's usually a young woman – who creates something great becomes a sort of shorthand for everything that is wrong/right about her chosen art form is hardly an incentive to put yourself out there. Rooney's writing shows a deep ambivalence about fame, and her decision to now largely only put herself forward in the media when it serves her impassioned political beliefs is to be admired. Yet newspapers are still terribly prone to what I call 'Rooney-itis'. Look, I'm doing it now. When you're an author, public exposure doesn't just affect you, but the people in your life whose stories often overlap with yours. When you are writing about sensitive topics that have a lasting, painful legacy on real people's lives – as Ní Chuinn does in their excavation of the murderous legacy of English colonialism in Ireland – it can be an act of care and protection to remove yourself from the spotlight. Most of all, it makes the interaction between author and reader purely about the quality of the work. For a publisher to agree to publish an anonymous author, as so many did Ferrante, and publishers in Ireland, the UK and the US have Ní Chuinn, that writer has to be extraordinary. And Ní Chuinn is. It should give any avid reader of fiction – and any author who cares about sentences but is rubbish at TikTok – hope. The work can still be the thing, at least sometimes. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A new Irish writer is getting rave reviews – but nobody knows who they are. That gives me hope
What's in a pen name? Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn's debut short story collection, Every One Still Here, is receiving rave reviews and rapturous praise, but hardly anyone seems to know who they are. A cursory Google turns up no photos or biographical information. All we know is that the writer is Northern Irish and was born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday agreement. A statement from Irish publisher The Stinging Fly reads: 'The Stinging Fly has been working with Liadan on these stories for the past four years. From early on in the process, they expressed a desire to publish their work under a pseudonym and to protect their privacy throughout the publication process. No photographs of the author are available and Liadan will not be participating in any in-person interviews or public events.' Writing anonymously or under a pseudonym is a long-established custom in publishing. Jane Austen's novels were attributed to 'a Lady', George Eliot was Mary Ann Evans, and the Brontë sisters were Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Although women no longer need to disguise themselves as men, and 'the low trade of writing novels' is less stigmatised, the tradition of the pen name has continued throughout the 20th century into the present day: John Le Carré was really David Cornwell; Eric Blair became George Orwell; and no one has heard of Erika Leonard, but everyone has heard of EL James. When questions regarding the veracity of nature memoir The Salt Path caused outrage among the nation's book groups, the fact that the author had changed her and her husband's names was the least remarkable revelation. If anything, it can feel more unusual to meet an author whose books have the name they were born with on the cover. In the world of modern publishing, the spectrum encompasses everything from 'uses a pen name but has an author photo and gives interviews' to 'has an opposite gender or gender-neutral author persona'; 'uses different pseudonyms for different genres'; 'uses a different name for political reasons, eg to escape persecution in their home country, or personal or professional reasons'; and even 'secret anonymity' (is anonymous but tries to make it so that no one actually knows they are). Nepotist offspring will often use a less famous parent's surname to stave off accusations that they owe their success to their connections or, as in the case of AS Byatt, an author may use their married name to distance themselves from a novelist sibling (Margaret Drabble). Total anonymity, however, is a different business. The most famous modern example we have is of course Elena Ferrante (or it was, until she was possibly and, to my mind, very rudely unmasked by an Italian journalist.) Yet even Ferrante did some press through correspondence, including writing for the Guardian. To not give interviews at all, especially as a young debut author, is unusual indeed, and especially in a publishing landscape where 'personal brand' is key, and short stories remain such a hard sell. You could say that Liadan Ní Chuinn's collection being published at all is something of a miracle. Literary quality is not always prioritised above profile. I cannot tell you how many proofs I am sent by writers who are big on Instagram but can't string a grammatical sentence together. With publicity budgets not what they used to be and many authors needing to do much of the work themselves, a debut writer who won't give interviews or attend events represents a challenge to any acquiring publishing house and their publicity department. I admire Ní Chuinn. As an author myself – in the next six months I have two books coming out – I know that the stress of exposure and the risk of burnout can be very real. Ní Chuinn could be forgiven for looking at Sally Rooney, another writer in the same literary ecosystem who started young, and thinking that level of exposure looks unappealling. The way a young woman – because it's usually a young woman – who creates something great becomes a sort of shorthand for everything that is wrong/right about her chosen art form is hardly an incentive to put yourself out there. Rooney's writing shows a deep ambivalence about fame, and her decision to now largely only put herself forward in the media when it serves her impassioned political beliefs is to be admired. Yet newspapers are still terribly prone to what I call 'Rooney-itis'. Look, I'm doing it now. When you're an author, public exposure doesn't just affect you, but the people in your life whose stories often overlap with yours. When you are writing about sensitive topics that have a lasting, painful legacy on real people's lives – as Ní Chuinn does in their excavation of the murderous legacy of English colonialism in Ireland – it can be an act of care and protection to remove yourself from the spotlight. Most of all, it makes the interaction between author and reader purely about the quality of the work. For a publisher to agree to publish an anonymous author, as so many did Ferrante, and publishers in Ireland, the UK and the US have Ní Chuinn, that writer has to be extraordinary. And Ní Chuinn is. It should give any avid reader of fiction – and any author who cares about sentences but is rubbish at TikTok – hope. The work can still be the thing, at least sometimes. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
After the Troubles: Liadan Ní Chuinn's phenomenal debut
Every One Still Here, t he first short story collection by Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, is something of a mystery. The name is a pseudonym and the book comes with no author photograph: all we are told is that they were born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday agreement. But, reading Ní Chuinn's work, one thing quickly becomes clear: this is a phenomenal debut. The opening story, We All Go , follows Jackie, a student stultified by both a claustrophobic home life and the anatomy classes they attend at university. Ní Chuinn's prose is austere and precise: a technician places a body's 'white fascia and curds of yellow fat' into a bowl, while the narrator feels queasy. It is a tale of disconnections – physical and emotional. Jackie's mother, seemingly, has no sympathy for her: the heaviness of one is inexpressible to the other. This pattern is repeated throughout. In Amalur, a young girl confides her pregnancy to a family friend, unable to tell anyone else. In Novena, a fraudulent fertility clinic leaves a Northern Irish town divided and reeling. In Mary , written in the second person, 'you' join a writing class after being made unemployed. Among the regular passengers on the bus to the class is a child named Mary, who the protagonist tries and fails to commit to paper. The tutor asks: 'Is she a character? Or is she a metaphor?' This is a post-Troubles world, in which trauma lingers in every interaction: rendering it in fiction is a fraught, complicated task. Ní Chuinn's scenes are filled with shattered glass, broken bones, cannulas, needles, desperate ambulance rides. By the final story, Daisy Hill , we are braced for terrible events. A character is slumped on the floor, and here is yet another uncle, brother or father to mourn. The collection's true force, however, is only revealed at the end. In a coda, Ní Chuinn records – in chilling, factual, present tense – the deaths of dozens of real people killed by British state forces. The painful scenes of Every One Still Here do not, as one character has it, recur by coincidence – they are the direct consequence of a political situation. This is heart-stopping writing, and I hope for more to come from the mysterious Ní Chuinn. Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn is published by Granta (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49. Delivery charges may apply Photography by Olivier Martel for Getty Images
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn review
The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney's North (1975), Jennifer Johnston's Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and Bernard MacLaverty's Cal (1983), to Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man (1994), Anna Burns's Booker-winning Milkman (2018), and Louise Kennedy's Trespasses (2022). The latest addition to the corpus, a slim debut story collection by nonbinary Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, shares the brilliance and burning energy of those other books, but there is a fundamental distinction. Ní Chuinn was born in the year of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 power-sharing deal that delivered peace and brought an end to the Troubles; why, then, should their writing be so obsessed with them? 'I believe, these things, they're the making of us,' a character says at one point. He's talking about a dead friend, but his words might apply to Northern Ireland's past 50 or so years. Throughout the book the violence of that period is shown to persist, the past proving powerfully, inconveniently alive. Tensions flare between those who attempt to ignore that fact and others who insist on it. The narrator of the title story, Jackie, sometimes uses slashes to prevent him having to choose between alternative nouns: 'It looks like a morgue/a nightmare and it smells like a butcher's but with chemicals mixed in.' Ní Chuinn's writing is often terse, blunt, its subject matter better served by urgency than elegance. Jackie is a young man haunted by the internment, before his birth, of his uncle and grandfather – also Jackie – and by loyalists having hijacked his parents' car when his mother was pregnant with him. When Jackie was a boy his father fell ill and appeared to enter a vegetative state. Ní Chuinn, a writer of subtlety despite the polemic that veins these stories, doesn't push hard on the metaphor, but this 'lax and unmoving' figure can be read as a symbol for a Northern Ireland that forgets its history. In fact, as another character – born, like Jackie, after the Good Friday agreement – insists later on, in Northern Ireland the past bears down on the present with such weight that it is an error to even call it history. Ní Chuinn forgoes an epigraph, but a lesser writer, one more in need of underlining their aims, would have reached for Faulkner's lines from Requiem for a Nun: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' There is space, though, for other concerns and registers. Novena features Moll, second-generation Irish with a father from East Timor. Her grandmother, who is literally keeping the faith, texts Moll: 'Said special prayer. You should feel it in couple mins.' But the church she attends announces the impossibility of single funerals owing to a lack of priests, and its congregants listen to hymns on CD because 'there is no choir'. In the story Russia, which centres on a brother and sister adopted from that country, a psychic asks her client why he's come. Aren't you supposed to know? he answers. 'The psychic says: Everyone, no word of a lie, every single person says that. You've, none of youse, you've no concept of how this works.' Ní Chuinn's humour flashes brighter for its infrequent use. The same story describes a series of anonymous protests at a museum. Flowers of remembrance are being left at exhibits containing human remains: the preserved corpse of an ancient Egyptian, a Viking skull, a stone age woman's bones. This broadens the book's preoccupation with the past while simultaneously, in the manner of Heaney's bog poems, linking ancient instances of violence with the sectarian murders committed within living memory. Not everyone is willing to have such connections pointed out. In the closing story, Daisy Hill, a young man's obsession with the Troubles exasperates his family. 'I'm sick of this, right, Rowan?' his cousin Shane says. 'It happened, right? It happened, two sides, either side, both, it happened, it stopped.' Rowan rejects not only the urge to leave the past behind, but Shane's characterisation: 'I hate that, says Rowan. It's not both sides, it's not either side, it's this huge fucking army, it's this huge fucking state, this government that does whatever it wants, that just, that, they can kill us, and kill us.' Reading this book as the Israeli state kills unprecedented numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza feels particularly difficult, but also valuable – or as valuable as reading can be in the circumstances. Ní Chuinn's stories are unpredictable and memorable. While they contain the stuff of plots – family secrets, abuse, fraudulent fertility clinics and human trafficking – these aren't their true subjects, and they almost entirely lack the resolution provided by that familiar short-story trait, the epiphany. Rather than accounts of revelation, these are reports from the knotty midst of things. They describe entanglements that cannot be ignored or consigned to history. 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 Daisy Hill ends with a threnody subtitled The Truth, nine pages detailing more than 50 murders of Northern Irish civilians by British soldiers. Ní Chuinn quotes a Conservative government minister's contemporary praise for the impartiality and professionalism with which British soldiers performed their duties. 'The British state,' Ní Chuinn writes, correcting the record, 'kills and it kills and it kills and it kills.' This extraordinary book's final words – 'nobody is ever charged' – jam open the door to a past many would prefer to remain shut away. Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
