Colm Tóibín, Louise Kennedy and Ciarán Folan win prizes; four Irish poets on Forward shortlists

In The Irish Times this Saturday, there is a Q&A with Mary O’Donoghue, whose first short story collection, The Hour After Happy Hour, has just been published; and Caroline O’Donoghue writes about the love of a true friend.

Reviews are Fintan O’Toole on A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Connell; Adrian Frazier on Gerard O’Donovan: A Life, 1871-1942; Muiris Houston on Vital Signs: Poems of Illness and Healing by Martin Dyar; Claire Hennessy on the best new YA fiction; Mark Paul on This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter by Tomiwa Owolade; Edel Coffey on The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue; Lucy Sweeney Byrne on A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs; Brigid O’Dea on Sensitive: The Power of a Thoughtful Mind in an Overwhelming World by Jenn Granneman & Anre Sólo; Thomas Lordan on Adam Shatz’s Writers and Missionaries; Sean Duke on Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History by Jonathan Kennedy; John Walshe on I Will Be Good: A Dublin Memoir by Peig McManus; Gerry Moriarty on Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland by Niall O Dochartaigh; Deirdre Mulrooney on Shadows Behind the Dance by Maddy Tongue; and Sally Hayden on Doro: Refugee, Hero, Champion, Survivor by Brendan Woodhouse and Doro Ģoumãňęh.

This weekend’s Irish Times Eason offer is the bestselling thriller, Run Time by Catherine Ryan Howard. You can buy it with your newspaper for just €5.99, a €5 saving.

The French translation of Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, published by Éditions Grasset, has been awarded the Prix des Ambassadeurs de la Francophonie 2023. The prize is awarded annually by ambassadors in Ireland whose countries are involved in the Francophonie – a group of nations in which French is a first, official, or culturally significant language. The prize celebrates the French language and the openness of French readers to read beyond their own rich literary culture.

Literature Ireland co-ordinates the prize in cooperation with the French Embassy and awards a residency to the translator of the winning work. This year, Anna Gibson, Colm Tóibín’s translator, will be Literature Ireland’s guest in Ireland.

Tóibín was presented with his award at a ceremony in Dublin this week hosted by Canadian ambassador Nancy Smyth, a literature graduate herself who had studied Thomas Mann, the subject of The Magician. Anna Gibson sent a message of congratulations to Tóibín, saying, “Of all the writers I translate, Colm Tóibín is the only one I’ve had the privilege to follow over such an extended period of time. It has been fascinating to watch the sheer magnitude of the work unfolding, how themes develop, deepen, change, transform, retreat, come back in infinite shades and variations.”

Sinéad Mac Aodha, director of Literature Ireland, said “A writer-translator partnership of the kind that Anna and Colm share for over 30 years now is a wonderful example of how a writer’s words can be expertly carried across to a foreign language.”

Joachim Schnerf, speaking for the publisher Éditions Grasset, congratulated Tóibín on the extraordinary publishing success that The Magician has enjoyed in the French language.

Irish poets Jane Clarke, Susannah Dickey, Breda Spaight and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe have made this year’s Forward Prizes shortlists, among the most coveted and influential prizes for poetry in the UK and Ireland.

The Forward Prizes are awarded in four categories: the Forward Prize for Best Collection (£10,000), the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000), the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written (£1,000), and the inaugural Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed (£1,000).

Forward Prize for Best Collection Self Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant; Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan; A Change in the Air by Jane Clarke; Ink Cloud Reader by Kit Fan; My Name is Abilene by Elizabeth Sennitt Clough

The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection ISDAL by Susannah Dickey; A Method, A Path by Rowan Evans; Cane, Corn & Gully by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa; Bad Diaspora Poems by Momtaza Mehri; Cowboy by Kandace Siobhan Walker

Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written ‘My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce’ by Kathryn Bevis; Libation by Malika Booker; Oh do you know the Flower Man by Kizziah Burton; The Curse by Breda Spaight; Fricatives by Eric Yip

Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed Human. This Embodied Knowledge by Zena Edwards; The Cat Prince by Michael Pedersen; Almost Certainly by Bohdan Piasecki; The City Kids See the Sea by Roger Robinson; And our eyes are on Europe by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe.

Bernardine Evaristo is this year’s Chair of Judges for the Best Collections panel, and is joined by Kate Fox, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Andrés Ordorica and Jessica Traynor. Joelle Taylor is this year’s Chair of Judges for the Best Single Poems panel, and is joined by Khadijah Ibrahiim, Caroline Bird, Chris Redmond and Sue Roberts.

Louise Kennedy won the £4,000 McKitterick Prize for Trespasses (Bloomsbury Publishing) at the Society of Authors awards ceremony in Southwark Cathedral, London, last night. Described as ‘an intelligent, delicately told tale of love under military rule’ by judge Selma Dabbagh, Trespasses has already won Irish Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and Nibbies Debut Novel of the Year as well as being shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Ciarán Folan won the £2,000 ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award for his story, A Day.

Judge Claire Fuller said: “Our winning story drew me in from the very beginning, and then looped the idea of time over and under and over again so cleverly that I was never lost but felt I knew everything I needed to know about these characters and their situation. With its beautiful melancholic tone, ‘A Day’ by Ciaran Folan is storytelling at its very best.”

Folan has had stories published in The Dublin Review, The London Magazine, Prole and with The Stinging Fly online. He won the RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story Competition twice and was a runner up for the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award in 2016 and 2018. He was shortlisted for the V S Pritchett Short Story Prize in 2020.

Nicola Griffith won the inaugural ADCI (Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses) Literary Prize for Spear (Tordotcom Publishing), a lyrical, queer reimagining of Arthurian legend, in which ‘those usually airbrushed from history take centre stage’ (ADCI Literary Prize judge Penny Batchelor).

The prize, launched in 2022 to encourage greater positive representation of disability in literature, was announced alongside ten other prizes which make up the annual Society of Authors’ Awards. The SoA Awards is the UK’s biggest literary prize fund, worth over £100,000, this year shared between 30 writers, poets and illustrators.

Poet Jay Gao won both an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award for his debut collection, Imperium (Carcanet Press). Through reimagined episodes from Homer’s Odyssey, Imperium asks questions about diaspora and how past lives permeate the present. It was described by judge Wayne Holloway Smith as ‘the work of a poet mind shot through with intellect and cultural capital’.

Daniel Wiles won the Betty Trask Prize for Mercia’s Take (Swift Press), a brutal portrayal of life as a 19th-century miner and of a world wrecked by the exploitation that fed the British empire.

The powerful, ‘urgent and moving’ memoir None of The Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary (Canongate Books) by Travis Alabanza was a Somerset Maugham winner this year – a ‘testimony to the vicissitudes of living as a non-binary person of colour in modern Britain’ (Somerset Maugham judge Ardashir Vakil).

Keynote speaker Val McDermid said: “Awarded by authors, for authors, the SoA Awards hold a special place in the literary calendar. It is vital that we celebrate the work authors do to help us find meaning in tumultuous times, now more than ever. This year’s winners make that task easy. They have given us a plethora of riches: from sweeping novels, to searching poetry, to first works by exciting authors at the start of new careers. I hope each win fuels that joy of words that first gave birth to these many and various works.”

Sophie White has been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Novel Award for Where I End(Tramp Press). The awards, in recognition of the legacy of Jackson’s writing, were established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic.

The awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics. The other nominees are: Beulah by Christi Nogle (Cemetery Gates Media); The Dead Friends Society by Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall (Encyclopocalypse Publications); The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland Books); Jackal by Erin E. Adams (Bantam); and Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Tsai (Jaded Ibis Press).

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Jamaican writer Kwame McPherson has won the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. McPherson, who had entered the prize for the seventh time, beat 6,641 entrants worldwide to take the £5,000 prize

McPherson’s winning story Ocoee interweaves Caribbean folklore and stories from African American history. It takes its name from a town in Florida where, in November 1920, dozens of African-Americans were murdered in a brutal, racially aggravated attack. McPherson says he was inspired to write ‘a mishmash of African American reality and history, and Caribbean folklore’ because he felt that ‘there are so many stories in the African Diaspora experience that are not well known and can be told to open others to that experience.’

You can read the winning story here.

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The Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival has launched a unique new Storytelling project calling on everyone who engaged with the festivals over the last ten years to share their stories of the world class Beckett and Wilde Festivals in Enniskillen.

The new ‘Festival Tales’ project aims to map the role of community in the literary heritage of the town of Enniskillen, where both Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett spent time as pupils at the former Portora Royal School.

Digging deep into an unearthed treasure trove of stories, conversations and experiences, the project funded by the UK National Lottery Heritage Fund, seeks to capture the literary heritage and social value of the 10 years of literary-led Happy Days multi-arts programmes.

Regeneration specialist and Happy Days EIBF board member, Professor Jim Coleman, said: “As an economist, I am struck by the potential socio-economic impact of celebrating literary heritage in Enniskillen. Building a resilient, community-oriented literary heritage means keeping alive the anecdotes, stories and ‘peripheral’ culture that the Happy Days programme has brought to Enniskillen.”

Stories, reminiscences, anecdotes and experiences - the ordinary and extraordinary, of the Happy Days festivals - are all welcome and can be submitted via the new ‘Festival Tales’ website https://www.happydaysstories.com/ before July 15th.

Joseph Connelly, Lee Child. Monica McWilliams and Bronagh Hind are among the guests announced for the John Hewitt International Summer School 2023 in the Market Place Theatre and Arts Centre Armagh from July 24th to 29th. This year’s theme is The State we’re in: Back to the future, inspired by Hewitt’s 1958 poem An Irishman in Coventry.

Tony Kennedy, chair of The John Hewitt Society, said, “Hewitt saw his move to the English midlands in the 1950s to establish the Herbert Museum, Coventry as realisation of the society he’d argued for, with the values he saw as progress – free education, health and welfare, reduced social and financial inequality, greater diversity and mutual tolerance, and strong support for the arts in a city twinned with Dresden, Germany, both icons of peace, reconciliation and progress towards European unity.”

“With that post-war consensus broken down and the rejection of the European ideal, an increase in inequality and poverty, renewed inflation, and a land war raging in Europe, we will hope during the week to explore how we can find a way forward towards Hewitt’s optimism of sixty years ago. Can poets, playwrights, artists and activists take us to that “state of hope”?”

The opening talk will be delivered by Bobby McDonagh Former Irish Ambassador to the UK, with other speakers featuring Prof Jon Tonge, Dr Olena Snigyr from Ukraine, a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence, Owen Reidy, General Secretary of the ICTU, and Dr Connal Parr.

Armagh writer Stuart Neville will host a crime fiction special with international bestselling writers Lee Child and Andrew Child. Other celebrated authors include Joseph O’Connor, Denise Mina, playwright Frank McGuiness, Billy O’Callaghan, Caleb Azumah Nelson and Sarah Moss. Belfast author Jan Carson will host our debut novelists, Priscilla Morris and Michael Magee.

Neil Hegarty, co-editor of the recent No Alibis Press collection of essays, “Impermanence”, will chair a discussion with contributors Jan Carson, Susan McKay and Nandi Jola. The strong poetry programme lineup includes Frank McGuinness, Will Harris, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Gail McConnell, Michael McKimm, Maureen Boyle and Emma Must. While Lifeboat Press present recent work by local poets Dane Holt and Sacha White.

Evening entertainment will include two plays – Fishamble Theatre Company’s production of King, starring Pat Kinevane and Becoming Marvellous with Cathy Carson. Full details of the programme are available online at johnhewittsociety.org and visitarmagh.com

An Post has launched the very first Book Club on TikTok in Ireland, inviting readers to come together in a virtual space on #BookTok to discuss and share their passion for books.

Kicking off in July with the first book, each month will see a new title picked, and members will be invited to read, dive into the detail and discuss the book with other Book Club members. Not only that, An Post has teamed up with a host of readers and writers, to bring members exclusive interviews, live events, and even discounts on the monthly Book Club pick - as well as some great content on their TikTok account - @anpostofficial.

Rachal Shanahan, An Post Social Media Manager said ‘We are thrilled to launch Ireland’s very first TikTok Book Club. Along with our sponsorship of the An Post Irish Book Awards for the past number of years, our move into the #BookTok space is a natural addition to the work we’re already doing to promote reading, literacy and a love of books. We’re looking forward to reading July’s Book Club pick – ‘Dirty Laundry’ by debut author Disha Bose with new Book Club members and hope that this is just the start for the An Post Book Club.’

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On Thursday, July 6th, Yan Ge will discuss her short-story collection Elsewhere, just published by Faber, with fellow author Mia Gallagher at Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street, at 6.30pm. This is Yan’s first book written in English and she will be reading from it and talking about the genesis of the stories and her own evolution as a writer moving between languages. The event is free but you can reserve a place. Yan Ge in conversation with Mia Gallagher