John Banville has won the prize for fiction in the inaugural Irish Book Awards with his Booker prize- winning novel The Sea. In the non-fiction category the award was won by a memoir about an Irish childhood, Brian Dillon's powerful In The Dark Room.
Recent Whitbread Children's Book winner Kate Thompson won the third category, the children's prize, with The New Policeman.
While Banville and Thompson were expected to win, these prizes - which were drawn from three strong shortlists, each consisting of six titles written by Irish and Irish- based authors - presented interesting possibilities for the reading public as well as the judges.
While the €10,000 Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year seemed destined for Banville's The Sea, this category's shortlist selection drew deserved attention to one of the finest Irish books of recent years, Brian Lynch's beautiful novel The Winner of Sorrow, which was published by Irish publisher New Island Books.
Based on the life of the 18th-century English poet William Cowper, this graceful and witty narrative is a study of an eccentric genius which makes brilliant use of the respective nuances of Regency social history as well as the darker themes of guilt and psychological tragedy. If Banville always looked the winner, he had worthy competition in Lynch.
The €7,500 Argosy Irish Non-Fiction Award category featured three memoirs, a biography, a historical biography and social analysis.
John McGahern's Memoir tells of his love for his mother and his fear of his dogmatic father, and serves as vivid Irish social history. It is a strong book in any company.
However, the judges interestingly decided on Dillon's remarkable and harrowing account of how all life and hope in his home was devastated by the agonising illness of his mother, culminating in her eventual death as well as Dillon's father.
It is an immensely sophisticated, literary, quasi-philosophical and European performance looking to Benjamin, Barth and Sebald.
McGahern's beguiling, winsome narrative is true to his traditional approach to narrative and offers glimpses of his slow-burn humour.
Dillon looks to a bleaker intelligence, openly engaging with abstract concepts of thought and memory.
As with Lynch's novel, Dillon's memoir was also published by an Irish publisher, Penguin Ireland.
Fresh from her Whitbread category victory, Thompson won the €5,000 Dublin Airport Authority's Children's Book of the Year with The New Policeman. It is original, inventive and looks to Irish myth and music in an exciting, thoughtful way. The category shortlist again recognised quality with the inclusion of Deirdre Madden's Snakes' Elbows and established children's author Siobhán Parkinson's Second Fiddle.
