Books

Meet the judges: Former winner Paul Perry and author Hugo Hamilton

With Ciaran Carty they select this year’s Hennessy Literary Award winners

The judges: Paul Perry, Ciaran Carty and Hugo Hamilton. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

Ciaran Carty
Sat Apr 9 2016 - 01:00

Winning a Hennessy Literary Award brings some useful money, but that’s not what really matters. Paul Perry was so carried away with excitement when he won the First Fiction and New Irish Writer of the Year awards, in 1998, with his story ‘ The Judge’ that he missed his flight back to the University of Houston, in Texas, and had to spend much of his prize on another ticket.

The Dublin-born writer, who now teaches the MA in creative writing at University College Dublin, will judge this year’s Hennessy Literary Awards with the novelist and playwright Hugo Hamilton, whose first stories were published in New Irish Writing in 1986 and 1988.

In 2003 Salmon launched ‘The Drowning of the Saints’, the first of Perry’s four poetry collections, and he won the Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Fellowship in 2015. He leads a double life under the pen-name Karen Perry, writing two ‘New York Times’ bestsellers, ‘The Boy That Never Was’ and ‘Only We Know’, in collaboration with the Dublin novelist Karen Gillece, who was shortlisted for a Hennessy award in 2001 with her first fiction, ‘Reunion’, and won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009 with her novel ‘Longshore Drift’. Their third novel, ‘Girl Unknown’, is due later this year.

Hugo Hamilton grew up in Dún Laoghaire speaking Irish and German, the languages of his parents. “I only learned English later in school,” he says.

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He has been acclaimed for his novels and his haunting 2003 memoir, ‘The Speckled People’, confronting the contradictions of his childhood. He adapted ‘The Speckled People’ for the stage in 2011 and followed up in 2014 with another play, ‘The Mariner’, based on his grandfather’s return from the first World War.

“Writing for the theatre is such a different form of storytelling,” he says. “The stage offers me a completely new way of examining and reimagining the material I work with. Most recently I have become involved in writing a monologue for James Connolly as part of the 1916 commemorations. I am working on a novel at present – but will not be able to stay away from writing for the theatre.”