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Irish Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Dublin Literary Award winner Michael Crummey on losing his belief in redemption: ‘It feels like a pretty dark time'
'I'm dealing with a pretty bad case of impostor syndrome at the moment. I mean, I'm thrilled out of my mind, of course, but I just can't quite believe it yet.' Author Michael Crummey has just found out he's this year's winner of the Dublin Literary Award . Sponsored by Dublin City Council , the prize is unique in that nominations are submitted by librarians and readers from a network of libraries around the world. It also offers a uniquely large prize pot: the winner receives €100,000. Having been longlisted four times (in 2003, for River Thieves, in 2007, for The Wreckage, in 2016, for Sweetland, and in 2021, for The Innocents), and shortlisted once before (in 2011, for Galore), Crummey says he 'made a point of not spending that money in my head when I was shortlisted'. Also, he was up against fierce competition this year – the shortlist included the Booker Prize -winning Prophet Song, by Irish author Paul Lynch , and the Booker-shortlisted and National Book Award-winning James, by Percival Everett . Now that he can start counting his chickens, Crummey says he'd like to 'give a little chunk of money to both of our daughters, which I've never had the ability to do before. And my wife and I have some things around our house that we would like to get done.' READ MORE The 59-year-old speaks via video call from said house in his native Newfoundland, where the winning novel, The Adversary , is set. In fact, all of Crummey's six novels so far are set on the east-Canadian island. 'When I started out, I really felt the desire to try to get this place on paper,' he says. 'Newfoundland was largely an oral culture right up until my parents' generation ... There were a handful of Newfoundland writers in the generation before us, but they were outliers – they were so rare that there was no such thing as a literature of Newfoundland.' But another reason he's compelled to write about the place is that it's simply 'the most interesting place I've ever been'. 'Because it's an island, and has been isolated for so long, it's a place and people unto itself. The people here had to rely on themselves in so many ways: for survival, first of all, and also just to make a life for themselves, to entertain themselves, to build a world.' We speak about the Irish influence on the island, which he says is 'palpable in just about every community'. [ Newfoundland communities are 'most Irish' outside Ireland, genetic study finds Opens in new window ] 'There's what they call the Irish loop on the Avalon [Peninsula], and those communities are almost 100 per cent Irish. The mayor of Waterford was over here a number of years ago, and he said when he was on the southern shore of Avalon, he felt like he was in Waterford – just hearing people speak, and their names, everything. There's a non-broken line of descent from those original Irish settlers.' Michael Crummey: 'I don't know if I would have written a book like The Adversary 20 years ago. It feels to me like the world is embracing ideas and people who feel like violence and cruelty and disdain for people who have less is to be celebrated.' Photograph: Chris Bellew/Fennell Photography The early 19th century, a period during which many of these settlers were arriving to work as labourers, is the setting for The Adversary. A Cain and Abel-inspired fable, the book tells of a feuding brother and sister in the harbour town of Mockbeggar, a place whose harsh climate and corrupt power systems make life a fight for survival. The sister, Widow Caine, wears men's clothing, and will resort to any means to secure the kind of power and agency enjoyed by her brutish brother Abe, who is also fixated upon his own sense of importance and superiority. Though it can be read as a stand-alone, Crummey says he wrote The Adversary as a companion piece to his previous novel, The Innocents, which told of a brother and sister orphaned and left alone in a small cove not far from Mockbeggar. 'I've always thought that the engine of that book was their love in the circumstance that they find themselves in. But because the book was called The Innocents, I kept thinking about Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, and I started to wonder, could I do what he did where he took Songs of Innocence and flipped it on its head? I think he said he was writing those sequences to show the two contrary natures of the human soul. So really, The Adversary was a deliberate attempt to write the worst of who we are as human beings.' You just have to look at people like Trump and Putin and Netanyahu – the list is endless. I think they are who they appear to be … In most cases, they get worse — Michael Crummey The present age, in which 'the worst of who we are as human beings is on the ascendance, particularly in the political realm' was part of what gave rise to the story, Crummey says. 'It feels like a pretty dark time. I don't know if I would have written a book like The Adversary 20 years ago ... It feels to me like the world is embracing ideas and people who feel like violence and cruelty and disdain for people who have less is to be celebrated.' While writing, Crummey deliberately avoided a redemption arc for his central characters. And while Caine and Abe are adversaries, this is not a hero/anti-hero set-up. Rather, both central characters are anti-heroes. Narratively, this presented a challenge: how do you write characters who don't change? Crummey's approach was to turn the focus to the characters around the Widow and her brother. 'It's about what happens when you find yourself in the orbit of a black hole, and how everyone, in the end, gets pulled into that abyss.' He likens the scenario to Trump's relationship with the United States. 'When he was elected the first time, endless numbers of commentators said, 'We don't have to worry too much because there will be adults in the room, and they will curb the worst of his impulses.' And, of course, they all left or got fired or else decided [to] get on the train and become enablers. And that's what happens in this novel. People either decide to get on the train, or they're pushed aside, or destroyed.' The current political climate has made Crummey 'more misanthropic' than he used to be, he says. I have always said that ignorance has been my best friend in this whole process - not knowing how bad I was at the start, not knowing how long it was all going to take — Michael Crummey 'I've lost the ability to believe that redemption, or a personal change, can come over anybody. You just have to look at people like Trump and Putin and Netanyahu – the list is endless. I think they are who they appear to be ... In most cases, they get worse, as well.' Misanthropic may be the word he uses to describe himself but across the screen Crummey seems a gentle and open type, with endless passion for his work. Michael Crummey likens his narrative approach in The Adversary to Trump's relationship with the US: 'People either decide to get on the train, or they're pushed aside, or destroyed' Writing, he says, 'felt like a vocation from the beginning, but a ridiculous vocation. It felt a bit like saying, well, I want to collect bottle caps for a living.' Growing up, he followed his mother's influence and became 'the reader in the family', but it wasn't until he went to university to study English that writing became a serious pursuit. Poetry came first, then prose. Through his 20s, he worked 'crappy jobs' to support his vocation, publishing in journals and honing his craft, before releasing his debut collection of poetry, Arguments with Gravity, when he was 30. His debut short story collection, Flesh and Blood, came soon after. 'I think if someone had told me when I started out that it would be 13 or 14 years before I published my first book, I might have given it up or not started. But I have always said that ignorance has been my best friend in this whole process, you know, not knowing how bad I was at the start, not knowing how long it was all going to take.' [ Paul Durcan: 'Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others' Opens in new window ] Crummey's early work saw much success, including several award nominations and wins, but it wasn't until his third novel, Galore, that he began to feel he knew what he was doing as a writer. 'I don't know any writers who don't struggle with a sense of impostor syndrome,' he says. '[Being a writer] feels like it's something you keep having to prove to yourself. But I think [Galore] was the first time I wrote a book where I felt that's the book I was meant to write, and everything I had done up to that point felt it was leading me to a place where I was capable of writing that book.' The only problem with such an achievement, of course, was how to follow it. 'For a long time, I did feel like that novel was a roadblock. I'd written the book I wanted to write, so what do you do after that? But luckily, I have carried on, partly because I'm no good at anything else.' Of late, Crummey has been working on a poetry collection and some film scripts, though he also says he's 'starting to sneak back into that novel space in my head'. We joke that having won the award, all of that will go out the window. 'Now that I have some laurels to rest on, maybe I should just rest on my laurels,' he laughs. 'But I quit my day job about 25 years ago, and that felt like a fairly reckless thing to do. It always felt temporary. But I'm starting to think – I'm almost at retirement age – and I am starting to think I might make it through and as a writer. There's no certificate to put on your wall [to say you've qualified], but maybe that's the real sense of accomplishment and blessing – to think: no, this is it, this is my life, and I'll be able to do it until I decide I'm done with it.' The Adversary by Michael Crummey is published by Vintage Canada. Michael Crummey is the 30th winner of The Dublin Literary Award, sponsored by Dublin City Council.
Times
22-05-2025
- Times
Prisoner's release delayed by transphobia case
The woman at the centre of a trans prison row has had her release from jail delayed by more than two years and missed the birth of her granddaughter. Jayney Sutherley was accused by a fellow HMP Greenock inmate, Alexandria Stewart, of transphobia and verbal abuse that Stewart claimed led to her feeling suicidal. However, the allegations were found not proven by a sheriff on Monday after prosecutors failed to produce sufficient corroborating evidence. Supporters of Sutherley, who was serving six years and eight months for culpable homicide, said the case has had a 'devastating' effect on the 51-year-old. Paul Lynch, Sutherley's defence solicitor, said the case demonstrated the need for urgency in moving trans-identifying males from the female prison estate. Sutherley had the
The Hindu
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Review of International Booker Prize-shortlisted Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix
What is it like to live under tyranny? Why do so many people flee their homes? Who is responsible? Distraught at the descent into chaos in several countries and the West's indifference to the plight of migrants, Irish novelist Paul Lynch imagined a country (in the West) teetering on the brink, thanks to a totalitarian government, and the choices his protagonists are forced to make in his 2023 Booker Prize-winning book, Prophet Song. Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr traced the impact of 72 men arriving in the small town of Sicily in The Silence of the Choir (2017). They are 'immigrants', 'refugees', 'migrants' or 'exiles', but everyone in the Sicilian town calls them 'ragazzi' or 'the guys', and this encounter with 'The Other' forces some reflection from the local people: to shun or welcome them? Now, French philosopher and writer Vincent Delecroix has turned fact into fiction in his thought-provoking lean novel, Small Boat, translated by Helen Stevenson and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. Moved by a true story of a drowning in the English Channel in November 2021 — an inflatable dinghy carrying at least 29 migrants, including children, capsized, leading to the deaths of all but two — Delecroix raises uneasy questions about who is to blame for the tragedy. In our darkest hour Divided in three parts, the novel begins with a call for help to a radio operator with the French Coast Guard on a cold winter night, and her decision to not do anything about it. After most of the migrants drown — the second part of the novel has the harrowing details — the operator, who narrates the novel, is questioned by a policewoman. As the recording of the night is played back, five words she spoke to the migrants come back to haunt the operator: 'You will not be saved.' In his Introduction to the novel, British journalist Jeremy Harding writes that 'this may have been the narrator's darkest transgression: to have denied the comforting assurance of rescue... so that 'humanity need not doubt its humanity''. A debate about guilt ensues in the mind of the narrator. Several questions bother her; such as, for instance, why do men, women and children drown every night in the English Channel or the Mediterranean? When did the sinking start? To her, the migrants were sunk long before they sank. 'Their sinking didn't start in the Channel, it started the moment they left their homes.' Who is to blame? As her interrogation continues, the narrator wonders about its cyclical nature and why their deaths are pinned on her. 'Back we came to the idea that the cause of their death was — me. In other words, not the sea, not migration policy, not the trafficking mafia, not the war in Syria or the famine in Sudan — me.' Delecroix hits harder with the 'banality of evil' argument, with the narrator pointing out that the voice on the tape is not that of a monster or a criminal — 'it's the voice of all of us'. All of us who are blind to the suffering of others, whether at sea or on land. In the end, the narrator concludes that whether they drowned or not didn't matter; 'what mattered were my words. What mattered was not that they were saved; it was that I should be saved, and the whole world with me, through these words. Saved by my own words, not condemned by them'. In an interview to Delecroix says he found it easy to penetrate the narrator's mind: '...I progressively realised that I could really be her — and act and speak like she did.' As Harding contends, Delecroix's compelling novel raises the unsettling possibility that each of us is complicit in the suffering of migrants. Small Boat Vincent Delecroix, trs Helen Stevenson Small Axes/Simon and Schuster ₹399
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Free cycle shuttle set for £2.2bn Thames tunnel
Cyclists will be able to use a shuttle service when using a new £2.2bn tunnel under the River Thames when it opens next month, Transport for London (TfL) has confirmed. Opening on 7 April, the Silvertown Tunnel is 1.4km (just under one mile) long and will link Newham and the Greenwich Peninsula. TfL says the Cycle Shuttle Service will be able to carry a wide range of cycles and feature silver and blue branding to distinguish the vehicles from the regular bus network. The service, which will be free to use for the first year, will operate every 12 minutes every day from 06:30 to 21:30. The bikes should be no longer than 2.14 metres (7ft), no wider than 0.76m (2ft 6ins) and no higher than 1.4m (4ft 7ins) at the handlebar, and weigh less than 300kg (660lb) including the rider and any belongings being carried. E-bikes, as well as Santander Cycles and third-party hire bikes, will also be allowed on the service. It will have two stops, one on each side of the river, with the north stop located on Seagull Lane close to Royal Victoria DLR station, and the south stop located on Millennium Way near the junction with Old School Close. Pedestrians will not be allowed to use the service. Lorna Murphy, director of buses at TfL, said: "We have designed this service to support as many different cycle designs as possible within the physical space available, and we look forward to seeing Londoners using it once the Silvertown Tunnel opens." Stagecoach London's managing director, Paul Lynch, said the company had been getting its drivers and buses ready. "This new bus service simply means that cyclists can also benefit from the important new transport link under the river, and we're pleased to be entrusted with providing it by TfL." Listen to the best of BBC Radio London on Sounds and follow BBC London on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to A month until Silvertown and Blackwall tolls - key info Concern over low uptake for tunnel toll discount First look inside £2.2bn Silvertown Tunnel Silvertown and Blackwall Tunnel tolls start in April
BBC News
17-03-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Silvertown: Free cycle shuttle set for £2.2bn River Thames tunnel
Cyclists will be able to use a shuttle service when using a new £2.2bn tunnel under the River Thames when it opens next month, Transport for London (TfL) has on 7 April, the Silvertown Tunnel is 1.4km (just under one mile) long and will link Newham and the Greenwich says the Cycle Shuttle Service will be able to carry a wide range of cycles and feature silver and blue branding to distinguish the vehicles from the regular bus service, which will be free to use for the first year, will operate every 12 minutes every day from 06:30 to 21:30. The bikes should be no longer than 2.14 metres (7ft), no wider than 0.76m (2ft 6ins) and no higher than 1.4m (4ft 7ins) at the handlebar, and weigh less than 300kg (660lb) including the rider and any belongings being carried.E-bikes, as well as Santander Cycles and third-party hire bikes, will also be allowed on the will have two stops, one on each side of the river, with the north stop located on Seagull Lane close to Royal Victoria DLR station, and the south stop located on Millennium Way near the junction with Old School Close. Pedestrians will not be allowed to use the service. Lorna Murphy, director of buses at TfL, said: "We have designed this service to support as many different cycle designs as possible within the physical space available, and we look forward to seeing Londoners using it once the Silvertown Tunnel opens."Stagecoach London's managing director, Paul Lynch, said the company had been getting its drivers and buses ready."This new bus service simply means that cyclists can also benefit from the important new transport link under the river, and we're pleased to be entrusted with providing it by TfL."
