Autumn is certainly a season of mellow fruitfulness and it also has its share of literary awards. A former Booker Prize co-winner, one of Ireland's finest international poets and a master storyteller are among the winners of this year's Irish Times Literature Prizes. First awarded in 1989, the prizes, featuring five categories, presented every two years, are unusual in being both international and national, thus drawing on a wide range of writers. Also distinctive is the Pulitzer Prize-like mix of Irish fiction, poetry and non-fiction.
In winning this year's International Fiction Prize, Michael Ondaatje joins distinguished company which includes the first double Booker winner J.M. Coetzee, Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo and the only Irish winner to date, Seamus Deane. Far less impressionistic than The English Patient (1992), which shared the Booker with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger that year, Anil's Ghost, set in Ondaatje's native Sri Lanka, is a powerful political, and polemical, lament. The language is more vivid than lyric. This calm, melancholic and beautiful thriller, with its aura of helplessness, is a metaphor for many things, particularly human loss brilliantly and starkly weighed against the enduring patience of nature.
Among Ondaatje's achievements is his inspired use of ambiguity and a tone of weary candour. The narrative is driven by the multiple horrors tearing a paradise island apart, yet the characterisation of a cast of lost souls is very strong. Anil returns home to the Sri Lanka she had left 15 years earlier. Then, she was 18 and famous, at least locally, for her swimming. All that has changed. Now she is a doctor, trained in the US and specialising in forensic anthropology. As well as that, she has become emotionally weathered and knows more than she wants to about emotional pain and regret. She is a wonderful, defiant character: restless, dissatisfied, intelligent, reassuringly non-heroic and real.
Her return is not that of the nostalgic homecomer, but as the representative of an international human rights organisation. Assigned to work with Sarath, an archaeologist, it appears the official intention may be to disguise and conceal the dead by attributing the recently murdered to the more distant and, therefore, less contentious past. This is a brave, graceful novel sustained by understated anger. It is also an important one.
Michael Longley is one of the world's finest poets. The Weather in Japan, winner of the Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, testifies to his Homeric vision and lyric intensity, his balancing of the personal and the political, the formal and colloquial. This magnificent volume with its unifying tone of elegiac wisdom and outrage acts as both companion and consolidation of the poems in the Gorse Fires (1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995).
Images of the natural world and personal ghosts are balanced with classical references and allusions. Longley explores love, nature and the echoes of the past heard in the brutalities of the present, particularly in the context of Northern Ireland filtered through the battlefields of the Great War. Among the finest poems in this collection is 'The War Graves', which demonstrates his gift for catching the menace lurking behind even the calmest scene. "The exhausted cathedral reaches nowhere near the sky/ As though behind its buttresses wounded angels/ Snooze in a half-way house of gargoyles, rainwater/ By the mouthful, broken wings among the pigeons' wings." A more personal lyric, such as 'Fragment', explains the poet's quest: "Forty years I've been at it, working hard/ A poetic pro, no longer the neophyte./ I'm standing near the metalworker's yard/ And can't find the words for this starry night."
Another Irish poet, Cathal ╙ Searcaigh, wins the Irish Language Prize for his selected works, Ag Tn·th leis an tSolas (Yearning for the Light), which includes the new poems of the title. Born in Gort a' Choirce in the Donegal Gaeltacht, ╙ Searcaigh is an exuberant poet with an instinctive, celebratory rather than intellectual vision. His Irish is vibrant, sensuous, often passionate. North-west Donegal, where he lives at the foot of Mount Errigal, has remained central to his work. ╙ Searcaigh, known as G·r· na gCnoc, engages with his subject, whether it is the landscape or an individual. In a county such as his, the Gaelic literary tradition has always been dominated by prose writers - but he has shaped his own poetic voice. He has also achieved the difficult, some say the impossible, and is a fulltime writer in Irish, embracing the role of heir to a marginalised, though rich, tradition.
In recent years he has travelled to Katmandu, and these experiences feature in the new work along with poems, such as 'I nGaird∅n Ghleann Bheithe', celebrating his native landscape and society.
Three times previously shortlisted, William Trevor wins the Irish Fiction Prize with The Hill Bachelors, his ninth collection of stories, and first in four years. Recognised as one of the world's finest writers, Trevor's enduring genius lies in his ability to render the ordinary and familiar new and shocking. Irish stories dominate this collection, and as ever the reader is struck not only by Trevor's variety, range and accuracy of dialogue but also by the essential unsentimental Ireland he evokes.
These are calm, dangerous stories, urbane and crafted; a touch of the politely sinister comes easily to him. This is often merged with the simply seedy and is used to explore the petty tragedy of small, hopeless, non-heroic lives such as, quite brilliantly, in 'Against the Odds'.The superb title story describes a young man's return to the remote farm where his widowed mother still lives. It is astute Irish social history as well as a profoundly simple portrait of a family confronting change.
Some of the most interesting Irish writing in recent years has been in the areas of history, archaeology, historical geography and cultural studies. The scrupulous, forensic and insightful investigation by UCD academic Angela Bourke in The Burning of Bridget Cleary looks at the enduring power of oral tradition and folklore in a rural society. It is an absorbing work; cohesive and responsible despite its sensational nature. A young woman suspected of having been taken by the fairies is tortured and eventually burnt to death - more, it seems, out of fear than malice - in her home by her husband and a group of relatives and neighbours.
These shocking events took place in a remote Co Tipperary townland in 1895. As the Dublin and London newspapers of the day deal with it against a backdrop of land reform and Oscar Wilde's trial, the story emerges as one of confused belief as well as more routine petty resentments. Hubert Butler wrote about the case in 'The Eggman and the Fairies' in 1960. Bourke's examination of the evidence is based on careful research and an understanding of the beliefs, customs, contrasting expectations, class and fears of the protagonists, as well as the political and cultural relationship between Ireland and England. A chaotic scandal in its own time, it is Irish social history. It is also a parable and a dark morality play in which, as Bourke points out, there were no winners.
Ondaatje's win is significant, not only because of his novel's courage, anger and truth, but also because it was competing against other fine novels such as Philip Roth's The Human Stain and Denis Johnson's The Name of the World, a dramatic, prose-poem-like monologue echoing the mood of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. Also exciting was the shortlisting of Irish poet Denis O'Driscoll's Weather Permitting, an intelligent, perceptive and diverse collection looking at the ordinary, as in 'Buying A Letterbox'.