Women Writers

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

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: ‘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: ‘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: ‘Kate O’Brien is a master of classic realism. And that’s okay now. Mount Parnassus has many mansions’

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

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘The Real Charlotte’ may be the best Irish novel, qua novel, of any century

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

To mark International Women’s Day we’ve created an antidote to the all-male Irish Writers poster of bars and student bedrooms. Download your poster here

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘in translating the work of the Gaelic poets into English, she was to influence Thomas Moore and later William Butler Yeats. Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry, published in the year of the French Revolution, was and remains revolutionary’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘if you’ve ever read her work you know just how carefully she juxtaposes her sharp observations and wit against sadness and pain’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She brought a non-sentimental, unexpected, visceral approach to each scene that made her screenwriting exciting and exceptional. Great movie writers are rare in this country and she was one of them’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘The tattered state of my copy of Lynch’s childhood autobiography A Storyteller’s Holiday was a testament to much re-reading’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘I’m still all but stopping strangers to ask have they too discovered, however belatedly, one of our finest novelists?’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘It wasn’t until I reread the book over two decades later that I fully appreciated Maeve Binchy’s gift for mixing light with shade’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s prose is supercharged, spring-loaded, allusive and often very funny. She writes about Ireland with a kind of controlled passion’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Gregory has long been recognised as a great Irish person – but it’s time for her to be recognised as a great Irish writer too’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Her poems are tuned to the visible world but carry within marvellous, haunting refrains of absences’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Her phrases have the cadence of a softly falling tide’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Keane is a master of the glittering shallows, leading the unsuspecting reader into the squelchy horrors beneath’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Marina’s work is infused with a rawness, a dynamism and an energy unlike almost any other contemporary playwright’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She can do everything: be funny, be moving, be unflinching yet sensitive, write beautifully nuanced sentences and utterly gripping stories’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She’s on record somewhere as distrusting humour on principle. But her very seriousness now seems admirable’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Gregory’s translations weren’t perfunctory; they were vibrant, gory fun’

Celebrating Irish Women Writers: ‘Like Alice Munro, Ní Dhuibhne is a funny, original and brave chronicler of the lives of women’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Are You Somebody made a feminist of me, although I don’t think I knew that until now’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She has imagination, calm and a splendid anger’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Edna wears no armour, and the thought of her bravery and the weight of feeling she’s carried around for eight decades, almost breaks me’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Very few novels have the formal perfection, narratorial poise and sublime ability to make the unsaid and unsayable glow, as Foster does’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Elegant prose it isn’t, but there are few authors with a more authentically Irish voice. Peig Sayers spoke for generations of poor, uneducated Irish women who never had the opportunity to speak for themselves’

Celebrating Irish Women Writers: ‘her poetry is not only compelling in itself but for its vision of a female Ireland struggling out of traditional confinements and desperate to be free but angry, conflicted and haunted’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘The novels are patient, rich and beautiful. They feel fresh and ballsy, like the work of Edna O’Brien or William Trevor, but the style and voice are entirely her own’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She writes a kind of Irishness that is close to the bone: honest, hilarious, melancholic and a little bit painful to read. She is particularly good on women’s lives and thought processes’

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘For nearly 50 years, she has written such unprogrammatic, rhythmically inventive and, crucially, original poems’

Irish Women Writers: ‘Johnston has quietly got on with the business of producing a distinctive oeuvre of tightly controlled novels, short in size and huge in emotional impact’