"NINE publishers were interested, so the book was auctioned to the highest bidder. In the end, Bloomsbury got it. I was ecstatic." This sounds like the stuff of a first time novelist's wildest dreams (especially as the auction took place after the publishers had only seen six pages of the novel). But for Derry born Antonia Logue, who is only 23, this is reality.
The novel (now two thirds finished, and due for publication in 1998) is entitled Shadawhox, and is based on real personalities. It begins with a boxing match in Barcelona in 1908 between black Texan heavyweight Jack Johnson and Arthur Craven, the nephew of Oscar Wilde's wife Constance. Craven absconds with a sum of money to New York, where he falls for an English poet, Mina Loy. Antonia Logue discovered Craven's poetry while at school, and has been researching his life ever since. His relationship with Mina Loy certainly sounds welcome material for any budding writer: "They were both very striking looking and promiscuous."
Logue notes that most first time novelists in her position don't expect an offer exceeding £5,000 or £6,000, even from the major English publishers. Her advance - apparently in the region of £65,000 - is "a hundred times more than I expected. I was just hoping to get the book published." (Even £5,000 seems quite a lot when you consider that in the late 1980s, Roddy Doyle was offered £1,200 by Heinemann for The Commitments, and Colm Toibin got £1,500 for The South.)
Although, in the words of Toibin, Antonia Logue's case is "exceptional", she is one of a number of Irish writers whose first novels are being snapped up by big English publishers, and she is not the only one who has been offered a handsome advance. Katy Hayes (31), whose first novel Curtains appears next spring, has signed a two book deal with Phoenix for which she received an advance of £70,000. Sligo born Eamonn Sweeney (28) whose debut novel, Waiting For The Healer, has been accepted by Picador has received an advance for a two book deal which he says coyly is "over £10,000 and under £70,000".
Meanwhile a raft of other first time Irish novelists have been taken on by the big English houses, including Mike McCormack, Catherine Dunne and Anne Haverty. McCormack's Crowe's Requiem and Dunne's In the Beginning were bought by Cape, Roddy Doyle's publisher, and will be published next spring, when Chatto & Windus will publish Haverty's One Day As A Tiger. Faber will publish a first novel by Dubliner Keith Ridgeway in 1998 entitled The Long Falling. "We are always interested in Irish fiction, and it is particularly fashionable at the moment," says assistant fiction editor of Faber, Emma Platt (Faber publishes John McGahern - "the greatest living Irish author" says Emma).
"Irish writing is the hot topic," agrees Alison Walsh, who is Irish and works as a commissioning editor with Phoenix. "Any country developing culturally as rapidly as Ireland is bound to produce interesting writing." She is particularly pleased to see so many new female Irish novelists being taken on. In spite of the fact that a number of younger Irish women fiction writers publish with the bigger English houses, Alison feels that there was always the lingering perception that the "first wave" of younger Irish novelists was predominantly male. "Apparently one of the reasons the publishers here got so excited about Antonia Logue is that she's an Irish girl," says Georgina Capel, a literary agent with the Simpson Fox agency.
Antonia Logue's novel was taken on not because of any particular fashion or trend, says Liz Calder, publishing director of Bloomsbury, but simply because of the quality of the writing, which was very evident even in the six page extract: "We feel she is an extraordinarily gifted young writer, and in my considerable experience, it is the great writers who really sell. Because of the competition involved, we ended up agreeing on a very substantial advance, but we feel it will pay off, certainly in the long run."
Alison Walsh, agrees that paying big advances to young writers can be a worthwhile long term investment. Phoenix has just started publishing an annual collection of new Irish short stories, chosen by David Marcus, with the specific aim of finding "promising Irish writers". Katy Hayes was discovered in this way. "We have high expectations of Katy's novel," says Alison Walsh. "Authors' advances are based on the levels of sales we anticipate. Like the fiction of Roddy Doyle or Joe O'Connor, Curtains will appeal to a wide cross section of readers: it is fun but also sophisticated." The setting of the novel is contemporary Dublin; the characters are involved in theatre.
RODDY Doyle has lost count of the number of new writers whose work has been compared to his: "It's a mildly cynical selling device that doesn't really annoy me. I've never actually come across anyone trying to imitate me in a formulaic way. Georgina Capel notes that although as an agent she was hoping her protegees will evolve into "the next Maeve Binchy or Roddy Doyle", she is not interested in clones: "What you want ultimately is someone with a fresh voice.
Roddy Doyle's first experiences of publishing were very different from those of Antonia Logue and Katy Hayes. He and his agent, John Sutton, published 3,000 copies of The Commitments themselves in 1987, and ended up having to give away "about 2,000 books" recalls Sutton. Nowadays when Doyle has finished a novel he brings it to his editor Dan Franklin (who now works at Cape): "I ask Dan what he thinks it's worth and he does the negotiating. I get an advance, half before publication and half after." He won't discuss the amount involved.
While a first novel by a new author can sell as few as 2,000 copies in Britain and Ireland over a two year period, a Roddy Doyle novel, according to John Sutton, now sells several hundred thousand copies. Doyle is that phenomenon rarely seen since Charles Dickens: a literary novelist whose work sells in the sort of quantities we normally associate with popular fiction.
Once you enter the category of popular fiction proper, however, you are into a different league in terms of the earning power of books. The achievement of Marian Keyes (33) is a case in point. Her first novel, Watermelon, published by Poolbeg, has sold 100,000 copies in Britain and Ireland. She has just signed a deal with Reed Books in, Britain, whereby they will publish Watermelon and her next three novels (Poolbeg remains her Irish publisher). Her second novel, Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married, has been on the Irish bestseller list for 13 weeks and has already sold over 30,000 copies since August. When it comes out in Britain next year, it will have a print run of 200,000.
The deal with Reed involved an advance of over £400,000, allowing Keyes to give up her office job in London and return to Ireland to write full time: "I'm thrilled. This has opened up a whole new life for me."
Another Poolbeg author, Paul Carson, (better known as a doctor who specialises in allergies), has just had his first book snapped up by Reed. Scalpel, the tale of a psychopathic surgeon who works in a Dublin maternity hospital, earned Carson a substantial five figure sum, well over £50,000.
Anne Enright is currently working on her second novel, and does not want to enter into any negotiations until the book is finished. "This way I have complete independence, and I don't have to worry if I work slowly. I finish the book and then I sell it, rather than living on the advance - which essentially, means getting into debt - and maybe spending it all before I've even finished writing the book. You don't want to get a large advance, and then flop. If that happens, you're out of the business. You don't want to be a forced flower with a brief life."
Antonia Logue, although admitting that the full impact of her good fortune has not yet fully sunk in, is full of sensible sounding plans like using the first instalment of her advance as a deposit on a house. It seems that she has kept admirably cool headed ever since Colm Toibin first put her in touch with his agent and the offers from publishers started pouring in: "I wasn't confident enough to let them see more than six pages. They all asked to read the first four chapters, but I wanted to rewrite that part of the novel so I said no. She agreed to sign a one book deal because "two book deals put a lot of pressure on you. You commit yourself to getting the second book done by a certain deadline. That is all too scary and threatening for me to take on at the moment."
Could a young writer risk endangering or exhausting her emerging talents by receiving too much recognition too young? This fear seems unfounded in the case of Dubliner Lara Harte (21), a final year arts student at UCD, who is already putting the finishing touches to her second novel. Her debut First Time, was published by Phoenix last year, and will go into paperback in January. "I got a healthy advance from Phoenix, and it was very encouraging to get proper support so young. My ambition is to be a full time writer. It's hard work but it's what I want to do," she explains.
Meanwhile, there does not seem to be any thematic common denominator which might link these successful new novels, but a welcome freshness of approach is certainly evident. Eamonn Sweeney's novel, Waiting for the Healer, is set in a small town in the Irish midlands, and follows the fortunes of two young men who set out to find the killer of their brothers: "I wanted to do a novel with no father son conflict, and no sexual or religious repression," he jokes.
Anne Haverty's novel, One Day As A Tiger, is "a contemporary rural love story with a surreal twist," she says. The most intriguing sounding character is a lamb called Missy, one of a flock that has been "improved" with human genes.
Haverty, whose book attracted several offers from English publishers only a week after she gave it to her London agent, attributes the current popularity of Irish fiction to the fact that "Irish fiction is less literary and less insular these days."
So where does all this hype and glory leave the Irish publishers? "I got very little money for Forecourt, my first collection of stories which was published last year," says Katy Hayes. "But at the time, I had a lot of stories, I wanted to publish them, and Poolbeg approached me. I was happy. I wasn't expecting to make much money. But with the novel, it was different. I expected more. Forecourt got very good reviews, so I had a feeling I was going to be fortunate with the novel."
Alison Walsh of Phoenix adds: "Irish publishers must feel a little put out. After all, they invest in new writers and distribute them in Ireland. But the perception among Irish writers still seems to be that the place to be published is England." And with that sort of advance money available, who could argue?
But Mike McCormack was not so fussy. He sent his collection of stories, Getting It In The Head, (which recently won the Rooney Prize) to over 30 publishers in Ireland and England. It was rejected by one and all one publisher rejected the manuscript even before reading it, he recalls, and Cape had already rejected it once before accepting it after "a change of administration". His story sounds more familiar, the sort of scenario whereby Beckett had to try over 40 publishers before his first novel, Murphy, was accepted.
McCormack says he would not have had it any other way: "Rejection slips are your badge of honour. They mean you don't owe anyone any favours. If you can manage to contain your disappointment, they can put fire in your belly. They give you time to bone your craft and breathe."