Michael Magee wins 2023 Rooney Prize for Irish Fiction

Belfast writer Michael Magee has been awarded the 2023 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature at a ceremony in Trinity College Dublin this evening for his novel Close to Home set in the author’s native west Belfast.

The €10,000 Rooney Prize, awarded annually since 1976, celebrates an outstanding body of work by an emerging Irish writer under 40 years of age. It is administered by the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre for Creative Writing in the School of English.

The jury praised Close to Home for its “deep understanding of the craft of writing, its sensitivity to the power of place and its profound compassion for the survivors of personal and historical trauma”.

Magee, 33, said: “I’m staggered, really. This was totally unexpected, but hugely affirming. I’m grateful to the judging committee for their attention and consideration, and to Peter Rooney and the Rooney family for their generosity. Seeing my name alongside that prestigious list of previous winners, people whose work I greatly admire, is a great honour.”

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The author is the fiction editor of The Tangerine and a graduate of the PhD creative writing programme at Queen’s University, Belfast. His writing has appeared in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, The Lifeboat and in The 32: An Anthology of Working Class Writing. Close to Home is his first novel and was published by Hamish Hamilton. Close to Home has already been shortlisted for this year’s Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the

Prize jury member Prof Michael Cronin, Trinity College Dublin, said: “In his engaging, moving and inventive novel, Michael Magee traces with forensic precision the trip wires of social class and the catastrophic long-term legacies of paramilitary and state violence. He brilliantly captures the nuance, inflection and pace of the city’s language. His complex, fully realised west Belfast characters do much to counter years of negative stereotyping that reduced people in the area to the one-dimensional cyphers of tribal anger.

“Like any great literary work, Close to Home transcends the circumstances of its creation to give voice to any young person struggling to find a voice, to any community dealing with the incremental humiliations of poverty and exclusion, and to any human seeking for the gift of understanding and companionship.”

The Rooney Prize is the longest-established literary prize in Ireland. It is distinctive in its recognition of emerging writers and its ability to reward originality and risk. Previous winners include Seán Hewitt (2022), Kate Cruise O’Brien (1979), Neil Jordan (1981), Frank McGuinness (1985), Anne Enright (1991), Mike McCormack (1996), Claire Keegan (2000), Kevin Barry (2007), Lucy Caldwell (2011) and Doireann Ní Ghríofa (2016).

Benefactor Dr Peter Rooney congratulated the winner: “Michael Magee’s Close to Home stands as a compelling testament to his storytelling prowess, blending gritty realism with a heart-warming exploration of familial bonds. His vivid portrayal of Belfast’s streets and his characters’ enduring resilience make this novel an unforgettable and thought-provoking literary achievement. We are thrilled to add his name to our prestigious list of Rooney Prize winners.”

Eoin McNamee, director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre at the School of English, said: “The awarding of the Rooney Prize is always a milestone in the Oscar Wilde Centre’s year. It is an important affirmation of the work we do with our MPhil in Creative Writing and PhD in Literary Practice and we are very pleased to provide a home for it.

“Winning the Rooney Prize is hugely important to young writers as a validation of their work. Two of our alumni, Sara Baume and Claire Kilroy, have won the prize and we’re particularly pleased to be working with the 2022 winner Seán Hewitt, the newly appointed assistant professor in literary practice. We’re very grateful to the Rooney family for their invaluable support for Irish writing and look forward to continuing what has been a wonderful relationship.”

Mia Levitin, reviewing in The Irish Times, wrote: “The book’s themes – masculinity, class and history – don’t offer easy resolutions. Instead, Magee deftly conveys the anxieties of a generation facing an uncertain future.” In an interview with The Irish Times about his debut, the author said: “It’s about a university graduate from a working-class background, the first in his family to go. He comes back to Belfast, falls back into old habits with the crowd he grew up with, gets into a barney at a house party and thumps this guy. The rest of the story is him coming to terms with what he did and navigating the things that structured his life: class, masculinity, his relationship with his past.”

[ Michael Magee interview: ‘My family for a long time couldn’t really show their Irishness, it wasn’t safe’ ]

Magee told The Irish Times: “Being awarded the Rooney Prize means a lot to me, for all sorts of reasons, not least because of the prestige attached to it, my admiration for previous winners and the work they have produced, but also for the recognition, as an Irish writer from the North, from west Belfast, and the acknowledgement of the story I have tried to tell.

“As thrilled as I am to receive this prize, I can’t help but think about Adania Shibli, the Palestinian writer who was awarded and then subsequently refused the 2023 Literaturpreis at the Frankfurt Book Fair for her astonishing novel, Minor Detail. The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest trade fair of its kind in the world, it has a responsibility to create spaces for all writers, especially now, when voices sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle, both within Israel and across Europe and America, are being marginalised and, in some instances, violently suppressed. I extend my full solidarity with Adania Shibli, and with Fitzcarraldo Editions and Berenberg Verlag, who have provided a platform for this extraordinary work.”