Booksellers appeal for support in Budget; five Irish writers on Polari Prize longlists

Eithne Shortall discusses her new novel, The Lodgers, with Róisín Ingle in this Saturday’s Irish Times. And there is a Q&A with award-winning crime writer Steve Cavanagh.

Reviews are Brendan O’Leary on Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain by Stuart Ward; Ray Burke on Cracking the Case by Christy Mangan; NJ McGarrigle on The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen; Claire Hennessy on the best new YA fiction; John Self on Belfast: The Story of a City and Its People by Feargal Cochrane; Vona Groarke on Crisis Actor by Declan Ryan; Éilís Ní Dhuibhne on Hollie Starling’s The Bleeding Tree; Edel Coffey on Bellies by Nicola Dinan; Donald Clarke on The Last Bohemian: Brian Desmond Hurst, Irish Film, British Cinema by Lance Pettitt; Ian Hughes on Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall - From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson by Ferdinand Mount; Matthew Shipsey on Under the Knife by Liz O’Riordan; Mihir Bose on American Whitelash: The Resurgence of Racial Violence in Our Time by Wesley Lowery; and Sarah Gilmartin on Tom Lane by Ann Patchett.

This weekend’s Irish Times Eason offer is The Humans by Matt Haig, which you can buy with your paper for just €5.99, a €5 saving.

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Bookselling Ireland, the committee of Booksellers Association members representing bookshops across Ireland, has handed over a budget submission to the Government ahead of Budget 2024.

The submission proposes measures to enable booksellers to grow post-Covid and to mitigate any negative impacts of the changes to school book purchases, which could see up to 1 in 10 Irish bookshops being forced to close. The submission recommends: the introduction of a culture voucher scheme for three years, giving 18-year-olds the chance to experience in-person cultural events and products which would increase footfall and access to bookshops and other cultural spaces; an extension of the Night-Time Economy Support Scheme to allow smaller businesses adequate time to arrange the required number of events; raising awareness among teachers of social value clauses in procurement legislation and the strengthening of such clauses; the ringfencing of discretionary funding for libraries to allow them to purchase local interest books from local bookshops; and relief from commercial rates for bookshops until the end of 2024 to help ensure thriving town centres throughout the country.

Dawn Behan, chair of Bookselling Ireland, said, “The book industry makes an important and positive social, economic and cultural contribution to Ireland. Bookshops are where the rich talents of Irish writers meet the minds of Ireland’s readers and are an integral part of our cultural landscape while also employing over 3,000 people and generating €189 million to the economy. This presence and contribution should not be taken for granted therefore ongoing and responsive support by policy makers at local and national levels is of vital importance to ensure the sector can continue to grow, adapt and thrive.”

Five Irish writers - Kevin Brazil, Rosamund Taylor, Padraig Regan, Gavin McCrea and Sean Hewitt feature on this year’s Polari Prize longlists.

Celebrating a wealth of genres and forms, including memoir, poetry, historical fiction and gripping thrillers, the UK and Ireland’s only dedicated prize for LGBTQ+ literature is excited to announce its 2023 longlists for the Polari Prize and Polari First Book Prize.

Prize founder Paul Burston said: “This year’s Polari Prize longlists demonstrate a diverse range of LGBTQ literary talent, writing across many different genres and from a wide variety of perspectives. At a time when LGBTQ people are under attack, our stories matter more than ever. These are our stories. Read them. Learn from them. Celebrate them.”

The Polari Book Prize Longlist 2023

Fire Island by Jack Parlett (Granta Books)

A Working Class Family Ages Badly by Juno Roche (Dialogue Books)

Other People Manage by Ellen Hawley (Swift Press)

All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape)

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (Picador)

Mother’s Boy by Patrick Gale (Tinder Press)

The School House by Sophie Ward (Corsair)

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador)

Rookie by Caroline Bird (Carcanet Press)

Cells by Gavin McCrea (Scribe)

ScreenAge by Fenton Bailey (Ebury Press)

Here Again Now by Okechukwu Nzelu (Dialogue Books)

The Polari First Book Prize Longlist 2023

Love from the Pink Palace by Jill Nalder (Wildfire)

A Visible Man by Edward Enninful (Bloomsbury)

The Whale Tattoo by Jon Ransom (Muswell Press)

Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness by Kevin Brazil (Influx Press)

Rising of the Black Sheep by Livia Kojo Alour (Polari Press)

The New Life by Tom Crewe (Chatto & Windus)

None of the Above by Travis Alabanza (Canongate Books)

Orpheus Builds a Girl by Heather Parry (Gallic Books)

In Her Jaws by Rosamund Taylor (Banshee Press)

Is This Love? by CE Riley (Serpent’s Tail)

No Country for Girls by Emma Styles (Sphere)

Some Integrity by Padraig Regan (Carcanet Press)

Sara Berkeley has won the inaugural Yeats Society Poetry Prize for her latest collection, The Last Cold Day. Her editor and publisher, Peter Fallon, said: “The Gallery Press has published Sara Berkeley’s collections since 2005, each of which presents a credible version of a life, its pleasures and vicissitudes. None encapsulates the range of changes as much as The Last Cold Day. In this remarkable book of record, a woman’s life alters emotionally and geographically as the world is altered too - and she plays a valiant part in that mutation while earning a personal reward. It has been a pleasure collaborating on her poems and four books of them. Sara Berkeley’s work is worthy of the applause of the Yeats Society Poetry Prize.”

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods, the pen-name of Galway author Evie Gaughan, has topped both the Kindle and overall Amazon chart across ebook, audio and print, and the paperback is in the top 50 of the UK’s Sunday Times bestseller chart.

“It’s incredibly gratifying and thrilling to see how readers have taken to this book,” Gaughan said. “The response has been amazing and I couldn’t be more proud of the story and my publisher for championing it.”

You can read the author’s essay about her book here.

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Dubray has opened a brand-new, 2,000 sq ft store in Swords Pavilions Shopping Centre, bringing the group to 12 stores in Ireland, which employ 120 people.

Dubray began as a single shop in Bray in 1973 and has been rapidly expanding in recent years with the addition of new stores in Cork, Dundrum and Dublin’s Mary Street as well as a newly redeveloped website. The opening of this new shop in Swords Pavilions will

Maria Dickenson, general manager, said: “We are delighted to be opening a new store in Swords Pavilions which is one of Dublin’s premier shopping centres. There is a huge appetite for reading in Ireland and our new Swords team are very excited to start recommending books to customers in Swords and surrounding areas.”

And Other Stories author, Lutz Seiler, has been awarded the Georg Büchner Prize 2023 by the German Academy of Language and Literature. Past recipients include Max Frisch, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachman, Wolfgang Koeppen, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Thomas Bernhard, Uwe Johnson, Elias Canetti, Peter Handke, and Christa Wolf.

The jury said: “With Lutz Seiler, the German Academy for Language and Literature honours an author who began his career with melodious volumes of poetry and then found his way to storytelling, but he always remained a lyricist as clear as he is enigmatic, darkly luminous … His essays and lectures on poetry, on the other hand, bear witness to his argumentative precision.

“Seiler spent his years of apprenticeship in Thuringia, [East Germany] and this background has a profound influence on his narrative work in particular. Edgar Bendler in the run-down pub on Hiddensee, the main character in the novel Kruso, has long since left his country behind, without ever leaving the GDR. Thus Kruso and the subsequent novel Star 111 form the great epic of a declining country. As a novelist and as a poet, Lutz Seiler has found his own distinctive voice, melancholic, urgent, sincere, full of the wonderful echoes of a long literary tradition.”

Seiler’s humane, earthy writing comes to English-speaking readers with the aforementioned award-winning novel (Star 111, translated by Tess Lewis, September), acclaimed poetry (Pitch & Glint, translated by Stefan Tobler, September) and engaging narrative essays (In Case of Loss, translated by Martyn Crucefix, November).

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As part of Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival 2023, Max Porter presents Shy: An evening of storytelling, with special music guests on Friday, September 8th, at The Pav, on Carey’s Lane, Cork.

In the middle of the night, a troubled teenage boy is considering what could be his final decision in this world. This is Shy, by Max Porter, the multi-award-winning author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Called “A perfect book” by the Irish Times, Shy is a novel about guilt, rage, imagination, and boyhood. It is about being lost in the dark, and realising you are not alone.

In a powerhouse one-night-only improvised multi-disciplinary performance, the critically acclaimed British author will read an exclusive abridged version of Shy, joined by music guests from the SFSH/37d03d residency to be announced soon for a moving and inventive evening of storytelling.

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Merrion Press is to publish the memoir of former professional boxer and broadcaster Carl Frampton, written with William Hill Sports Book of the Year winner, Paul D Gibson on October 5th, 2023.

Gibson’s work includes the biography of Irish fighter Eamonn Magee, which won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and the Eir Sport Irish Sports Book of the Year awards in 2018, as well as the ghost-written autobiography of UFC star and pundit Dan Hardy.

Frampton commented: “This book has been years in the making so it’s very exciting now it’s time to share it with the world. Finally, I get to reveal the truth on everything that has happened in my life and career.”

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A reimagining of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and a memoir about the New York literary scene in the 1970s and 1980s have won the UK’s longest-running literary awards. American writers Barbara Kingsolver and Darryl Pinckney join the glittering line-up of authors whose books have won the James Tait Black Prizes.

The awards – presented by the University of Edinburgh since 1919 – are the only major British book prizes judged by literature scholars and students.

Kingsolver’s winning book in the £10,000 fiction prize, Demon Copperhead, published by Faber, is a poignant novel set in the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia. Pinckney’s winning book in the £10,000 biography prize, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan, published by Riverrun, is a memoir about the writer’s apprenticeship with authors Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and his introduction to the New York literary scene.

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A showcase of Modern Ulster-Scots Writing takes place Upstairs at The Sunflower Bar on Saturday, August 5th, 2-4pm. Free entry.

There has been renewed impetus in Ulster-Scots writing over the last few years. A diverse set of writers have published poetry, novels and videos, some of which have taken Ulster-Scots writing in new directions.

This independent event, the first of its kind, will showcase this body of work by bringing together a group of these writers. Contributors include Alan Millar, Angela Graham, Angeline King, Anne McMaster, Robb Morrow, Robert Campbell, Robert Millar, Ronnie McIlhatton and Stephen Dornan.

Whether you’re a speaker of Ulster-Scots, curious about the tradition, or even if you’re unfamiliar with, or sceptical, about it, you’re welcome to come along. To confirm your place email steevodornan@gmail.com.

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Former soldier and probation officer turned bestselling author MW Craven has won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2023, for The Botanist (Constable). The Botanist is the latest thriller featuring DS Washington Poe. The disgraced detective is tasked with catching a poisoner sending the nation’s most reviled people poems and pressed flowers.

Elly Griffiths, who was shortlisted for a sixth time, has been recognised as Highly Commended for The Locked Room: the penultimate mystery in the series featuring Norfolk’s favourite forensic archaeologist, Dr Ruth Galloway. Ann Cleeves received the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award in recognition of her impressive writing career.