Books

Lisa McInerney is jointly awarded £10,000 Encore Award

Lisa McInerney with her 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Photograph: Ian West/PA

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Martin Doyle
Thu May 10 2018 - 16:30

Congratulations to Lisa McInerney, who has been jointly awarded the £10,000 Encore Award 2018 with fellow John Murray author Andrew Michael Hurley.

McInerney, winner of the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize for her debut The Glorious Heresies, received the award for her second novel, The Blood Miracles. A sequel set in urban Ireland, the judges called it “a wild ride” with “potent prose”.

McInerney called it “such a boost”, also conceding the difficulties of writing a second novel. “Writing a second novel is made so much more intense by the worry that the first was the proverbial lightning captured in a bottle; the Encore provides an emphatic reiteration of welcome, so I’m pleased and very grateful,” the Galway-based writer said.

Fellow Irish author Sally Rooney’s debut Conversations With Friends was pipped at the post for the £20,000 Rathbone Folio Prize this week by Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami, a nonfiction book that brings together six years the foreign correspondent spent collecting firsthand accounts of the 2011 catastrophe’s impact. Delving into Japan’s folklore around grief and death, Lloyd Parry discovers strange and harrowing stories of survivors attempting to make sense of their losses, including those who never recovered a body.

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Coming up in Saturday’s Irish Times, June Caldwell pays tribute to her friend and mentor Nuala O’Faolain on the 10th anniversary of her death in an introduction to a new edition of Are You Somebody?

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