Women Writers

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Rather than constantly dealing with the same material and the same human dilemmas, she seeks out new horizons’

Mary Shine had a pleasant surprise when she opened The Irish Times last Saturday. Our poster brought back happy memories of her own project, which she is delighted to share

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Skilled, observant and empathetic, Mary Costello chronicles the specific and telling details of everyday lives in pivotal circumstances, and captures human yearning at its most instructive and affecting’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘This pioneering coterie left behind a literary legacy that advocated education for women, freedom of expression and egalitarian values which still hold true today’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She understands the limitations of the self and the fragility of the world – but this awareness of temporality in its turn gives O’Reilly’s work its authority and its arresting, lyrical power’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘You never get the tired trope of the same weary detective with an ex-wife and a drink problem, common to many crime series. What you do get is crackling dialogue, and whip-smart observations on the Irish zeitgeist’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Not only is Dervla (true desire in Gaelic) a wonderful writer, she goes out and does stuff – physically, often politically, wildly dangerous stuff, cycling and living for months on end in Gaza, Africa, Afghanistan, India, the Urals’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Read the novels and you’ll find much more mischief than morals, along with wit, compelling characters and keen human understanding’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Jennifer Johnston is canny; her laconic narrators reveal her sophisticated grasp of the many faces of Irishness’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘The line between holding it together and falling apart is thinner here than anywhere else in Irish fiction’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘I fell in love with the deep, beautiful humanity of her prose and the incautious honesty of her portrayal of the Irish female experience’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Her translations of Irish poems and songs have a tender simplicity and immediacy’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Had Elizabeth Bowen been a man, she would be recognised as one of the finest novelists of the 20th century’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She depicted with immense power the inner lives of women’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She pioneered a poetic language for those living unseen lives in the new territories of Dublin suburbia’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Nobody saw through the ascendancy classes more perceptively or wittily than one of their own’