McKeon's debut doubleThere was jubilation at the Old Lady of Tara Street, aka The Irish Times, this week when news landed that long-time arts writer for the paper Belinda McKeon – currently based in New York – has had not just one, but two, novels acquired by Picador.
The first, Solace, will be out in August next year and is described by Picador's Paul Baggaley as the most accomplished and perfectly achieved debut novel he's come across in years, marking the start of an exceptional writing career.
“I was immediately struck that Belinda’s writing uniquely highlights the tensions between rural Ireland and its uneasy contemporary reinvention,” he says. “She moves effortlessly from the emotional landscape of William Trevor and John McGahern to a new, vibrant Dublin with writing that is breathtaking in its subtlety and heartbreaking in its emotional punch.”
McKeon, who grew up on a farm in the Irish midlands and has just completed an MFA in fiction at Columbia University, says she is thrilled that Solacehas found such a fine home. Also a playwright, she lives in Brooklyn. Her second novel is called The Treasure. The deal was done by Peter Straus, of London-based literary agency Rogers, Coleridge and White, who was formerly with Picador. Having brought writers such as John Banville, Sebastian Barry, Patrick McCabe, Eoin McNamee, Colm Tóibín and Niall Williams to Picador while he was there there, it is, he says, very pleasing to see a new Irish writer join its ranks.
Getting into the current
Should writers have a polemical role in Irish society? Is it their responsibility to reflect the state of the nation? That's one of the themes of Writing and the Possible in 2010, a public panel discussion at the Royal Irish Academy this coming Thursday.
The first panel to tackle the questions posed by living in a much-changed Ireland will be novelists Julian Gough, Mia Gallagher, Kevin Power and Ian Sansom, and poet Kit Fryatt. They will look at ways the contemporary writer can work with the moment and reflect the zeitgeist – and discuss whether that should be part of a writer’s brief. The second panel will focus on the ways we read in Ireland now, online and through book clubs. Panellists Rosita Boland, Mary Cloake, Declan Kiberd, Jack Harte and David Torrans will look at how reading patterns have been changed by recession.
It’s an interesting debate to be having now, in light of Julian Gough’s broadside in February that Irish literary writers were cut off from the electric current of the culture.
What were writers in their 20s and 30s doing, copying the great John McGahern, his style, his subject matter, in the 21st century? asked Gough provocatively . “ If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the 1970s, 1960s, 1950s. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn’t know television had been invented.”
Reaction from the audience to this free debate is key, but registration is essential. It takes place in the academy’s beautiful building at 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2, from 6pm to 8.30pm. Book at ria.ie.
‘Skippy’ shortlisted
Irish author Paul Murray has made the shortlist for this year's Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, which also features Ian McEwan, David Nicholls, Tiffany Murray and Malcolm Pryce. Murray is shortlisted for his dark comedy, Skippy Dies, set in a boys' school in Dublin.
The winner will be announced at the Guardian Hay Festival later this month.
