The author published more than 50 works including the acclaimed Jack Taylor crime novels. Read more
Tag: Irish Authors
Was the ‘Worst Novelist in History’ In on the Joke?
Over the course of her career, [Amanda McKittrick] Ros became better and better at writing badly, and her popularity soared as a result. In this regard, she bears comparison with the New York socialite and singer Florence Foster Jenkins (1868–1944), whose operatic warbling was so popular that tickets for her show at Carnegie Hall sold out within two hours. Perhaps Ros was living in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance, or perhaps she accepted the ridicule as consolation for her fame. A more intriguing possibility is that she was engaged in an elaborate form of trolling. Read more
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Edna O’Brien, Writer Who Gave Voice to Women’s Passions, Dies at 93
Edna O’Brien, the prolific Irish author whose evocative and explicit stories of loves lost earned her a literary reputation that matched the darkly complex lives of her tragic heroines, died on Saturday. Read more
‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan
The biggest, most intricately ambitious little story you’ll read this year. Read more
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‘The Singularities’ by John Banville
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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Irish Stars Unite to Celebrate Overlooked Poet Patrick Kavanagh
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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Claire Keegan wins Orwell prize for novel about 1980s Ireland
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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Belfast poet Michael Longley wins €250,000 Feltrinelli Poetry Prize
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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Colm Toibin’s ‘The Magician’ wins Folio Prize for literature
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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