McCabe takes top prize at Irish Book Awards

The Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year title in the Irish Book Awards was won last night by Patrick McCabe for his brilliant and disquieting tale Winterwood.

McCabe beat fellow writers John Connolly, Claire Kilroy and John Boyne for the title, but Boyne managed to pull off quite a feat when his haunting tale of two children caught up in the horrors of Nazi Germany, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, won two other awards, the Tubridy Show Listeners' Choice Award and the senior category in the Dublin Airport Authority Irish Children's Book of the Year title. The film of Boyne's novel starts shooting in Hungary next month.

Another surprise was in the Galaxy Irish Popular Fiction Book of the Year category when Paul Howard's Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, written under his alias Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, outstripped bestselling authors Cecelia Ahern , Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes and John Banville, who featured on the shortlist with his crime tale Christine Falls, written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Also on the shortlist was Sinéad Moriarty.

Former footballer Paul McGrath's heart-wrenching autobiography Back From the Brinkwon the Club Energise Irish Sports Book of the Year. Meanwhile the "Lifelines" series, in which students from Wesley College in Dublin ask famous people about their favourite poem, was acclaimed when the last in the series, Lifelines, New and Collected, edited by Niall MacMonagle, won the Eason Irish Published Book of the Year title.

But in many ways it was a writer who wasn't there who was the star of the glittering dinner in the dining hall of Trinity College when the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award was posthumously awarded to John McGahern for his contribution to Irish literature, in the presence of his widow Madeleine.

The award was accepted by McGahern's editor at Faber & Faber, Neil Belton, while Declan Kiberd, Professor of Anglo Irish Literature at University College Dublin, gave the citation. Both were students of McGahern's at Belgrove National School in Clontarf from which McGahern was notoriously forced out in the 1960s.

"John McGahern was a rare, lucky kind of writer in that he was esteemed by intellectuals and other writers - but also embraced by ordinary people," said Prof Kiberd.

The other winning books were Gisele Scanlon's The Goddess Guide, which took the Irish Newcomer of the Year Award; Connemaraby Tim Robinson, which won the Argosy Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year; and The Incredible Book Eating Boyby Oliver Jeffers, which won the junior category of the children's section.

In this category PJ Lynch won a special award for distinguished contribution to Irish children's book illustration.