The biggest, most intricately ambitious little story you’ll read this year. Read more
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The biggest, most intricately ambitious little story you’ll read this year. Read more
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The Irish novelist John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance that it’s all too easy to view his work as an aesthetic project, an exercise in pleasure giving … But what drives Banville — and his relentless hunt for the ideal adjective and simile and cadence — is a desire to touch something elusive and not quite nameable while providing a parallel or overlapping commentary on that doomed but never pointless effort. Read more
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Celebrities including Bono and Liam Neeson hope to bring their homeland’s bard to a global audience with an album of read poems. Read more
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Small Things Like These takes the political fiction award, while Sally Hayden’s My Fourth Time, We Drowned takes the matching nonfiction honour. Read more
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Longley has become one of the most successful poets Northern Ireland has ever produced. His trophy cabinet includes the Whitbread Poetry Award, the TS Eliot Prize and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Read more
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The jury of three other writers — Tessa Hadley, William Atkins and Rachel Long — said they surprised themselves by reaching a unanimous decision. They said Toibin’s book “is such a capacious, generous, ambitious novel, taking in a great sweep of 20th century history yet rooted in the intimate detail of one man’s private life.” Read more
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