Deirdre Sullivan and Karen Vaughan win Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Award

Author Deirdre Sullivan and illustrator Karen Vaughan won the 28th Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Award with Tangleweed and Brine at a ceremony in Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin yesterday. Laureate na nÓg Sarah Crossan won the Children’s Choice Award for Moonrise. The Honour Award for Fiction went to Sheena Wilkinson for Star by Star; the Honour Award for Illustration to Kevin Waldron for Chocolate Cake; the Judges’ Special Award went to Eoin Colfer for Illegal; and the Eilís Dillon Award for a first children’s book to Meg Grehan for The Space Between.

Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, has won the Man Booker International Prize 2018. The £50,000 prize, which celebrates the finest works of translated fiction from around the world, has been divided equally between its author and translator.

Jennifer Johnston is the Bealtaine Book Club Author this year. She discusses her work, Naming the Stars, with my colleague Arminta Wallace this Saturday, May 26th, at 3pm in the Irish Writers Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin, as part of the International Literature Festival Dublin. Later that day, at 6pm, as part of the same festival, I talk to Kit de Waal in Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre about her new novel, The Trick to Time, and her award-winnng debut My Name is Leon. The event will be recorded for the Irish Times Book Club podcast on May 31st. Visit ilfd.com for details.

Coming up in this Saturday’s Irish Times, we have Adrian McKinty on David Peace’s Red Riding quartet; Emma Healey, winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2014, on the challenge of writing her second, Whistle in the Dark; the winning entries in May’s Hennessy New Irish Writing competition; John Boyne on William Trevor’s Last Stories; Paschal Donohoe on The Infinite Desire for Growth; Sarah Gilmartin on Motherhood by Sheila Heti; Rob Doyle on How To Change Your Mind: the New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan, and Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin; Paul D’Alton on Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich; Henrietta McKervey on Established: Lessons from the world’s oldest companies; Julie Parsons on The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford; Sara Keating on the best new children’s fiction; and Paul Clements on the best new local history books.