Leopold O’Shea wins Stinging Fly story competition; Girls Who Slay Monsters wins children’s book prize

In The Irish Times this Saturday, Paul Murray talks to Niamh Donnelly about his new novel, The Bee Sting. Fiona Gartland looks at the proliferation of subgenres in the crime writing field and asks fellow authors how useful they are. We have a Q&A with Arinze Ifeakandu, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize for God’s Children Are Little Broken Things.

Reviews are Daniel Geary on King: the Life of Martin Luther King by Jonathan Eig; Lynn Ruane on Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan; Matthew Shipsey on Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations by Simon Schama; Martina Evans on the best new poetry; Norah Campbell on Ultra-Processed People; Houman Barekat on Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong; Séamas O’Reilly on The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks; Edel Coffey on The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan; Rónán Hession on Melancholy I-I by Jon Fosse; and Sarah Gilmartin on Elsewhere by Yan Ge.

The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer is this Saturday’s Irish Times Eason offer. You can buy a copy with your paper for €4.99, a €6 saving.

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Leopold O’Shea is the 2023 winner of the Stinging Fly/FBA Fiction Prize. Established last year, the €2,000 prize, sponsored by Felicity Bryan Associates, is awarded annually to an emerging fiction writer published in The Stinging Fly during the previous year.

O’Shea’s winning story, The Afterlife, is his first ever published story, and appeared in The Stinging Fly’s Winter 2022 All New Writers Issue. The story, along with a special author note, can be read on The Stinging Fly website. O’Shea was presented with the award at The Stinging Fly’s Summer Issue launch at the International Literature Festival Dublin on May 20th.

Judging the prize were author Colin Barrett (Homesickness), Stinging Fly contributing editor and author Mia Gallagher (Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland) and Felicity Bryan agent, Aoife Inman. The panel was chaired by Felicity Bryan agent, Angelique Tran Van Sang, and Thomas Morris, author (We Don’t Know What We’re Doing) and Editor-at-Large of The Stinging Fly.

“What we loved about The Afterlife,” the judges said, “was the counterpoint between the eerie, off-kilter precision of the voice and the brutal inevitability of the events that unfold within its taut frame. This is an assured, uncanny, expertly controlled story that would pass as a delightfully droll and low key comedy of suburban manners if it wasn’t also a chilling fable flecked with unforgettable moments of glancing horror.

O’Shea said: “When I heard about this I wanted to vomit. For that and for making me want to keep going, thank you to everyone behind The Stinging Fly.”

Morris said: “At The Stinging Fly, our mission is to seek out, nurture, publish, and promote the very best new writers and new writing. This prize and our partnership with Felicity Bryan Associates is a wonderful way to illuminate the exceptional new work that we are privileged to publish each year in our magazine. We would like to thank all the people on our team who make this possible, as well as this year’s judges for their time and dedication to a very difficult task. ‘The Afterlife’ is a thrilling story, and Leopold O’Shea is a very worthy winner of the prize.”

O’Shea, who lives in Sligo, is working on his first collection of short stories. The Afterlife is his first work of fiction. He thanked the Irish Writers Centre for giving him a place on their National Mentoring Programme.

The judges also commended Switch Bitch by P Kearney Byrne and Fire Island by James Ward. Set in a world of squats, spliffs, dungarees and well-intentioned if perpetually compromised activism, Switch Bitch is a fresh, invigorating, and beautifully observed story of human interaction. It is full of the right details from the right time, and is powered from head, gut and heart. Exploring memory, identity and queer love, the author opens up spaces in the silences, in everything unsaid, pressing the reader to lean in and listen closer. With restrained and subtle prose, Fire Island evokes a whole world in a few short pages, expanding on beyond the final full stop.

The six winners of this year’s KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Awards were announced yesterday by host Rick O’Shea at a ceremony held in Merrion Square, as part of International Literature Festival Dublin.

Selected by an independent panel of expert judges, including a Young Judge, and a network of Junior Jurors nationwide, the winning titles include an illustrated retelling of Cinderella as Gaeilge; an anthology of unsung stories about Ireland’s mythical goddesses; a mischievous mystery for younger readers; a colourful adventure tale of bravery and friendship; and a supernatural page-turner for ages nine and up, drawing on the darker side of Irish folklore.

Girls Who Slay Monsters, written by debut author Ellen Ryan and illustrated by Shona Shirley Macdonald (shortlisted in 2022 for Cluasa Capaill ar an Rí), won both the KPMG Book of the Year Award and the KPMG Junior Juries’ Award, which is voted for by thousands of young readers across Ireland.

Following the winners of the six awards categories, Maria Flannery, KPMG Ireland Partner, announced 13-year-old Shi Lei (Mila) Chen from Presentation Secondary School, Waterford, as winner of the KPMG Reading Hero Award, which recognises remarkable passion and achievements in reading by a young person. Shi Lei was selected as the winner of this award, due to her love of reading in both English and Chinese, having moved to Ireland just two years ago. Her sister, Shi Rong, accepted the award on her behalf.

Elaina Ryan, CEO of Children’s Books Ireland, said: “Our congratulations to every one of the authors, illustrators and publishers celebrating their wins today. Through our KPMG Junior Juries programme, we have seen the wonder and delight that these six books have inspired in young readers across Ireland, and it is a joy to recognise and reward the artists that created them at this level.

“Ireland has always been a nation of storytellers, and every one of these winners exemplifies the sheer excellence visible in contemporary Irish children’s books. As we celebrate another year of the KPMG Children’s Book Awards, we hope that today’s celebrations encourage them to keep creating stories that speak as powerfully to their readers as these.” A total prize-fund of €16,000 has been awarded to this year’s winners.

The KPMG Book of the Year Award – Girls Who Slay Monsters by Ellen Ryan, illustrated by Shona Shirley Macdonald (HarperCollins Ireland).

The Honour Award for Fiction – The Boy Who Lost His Spark by Maggie O’Farrell, illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Tarrazzini (Walker Books).

The Honour Award for Illustration – The Wilderness written and illustrated by Steve McCarthy (Walker Books).

The Eilís Dillon Award for best debut – The Book of Secrets by Alex Dunne (The O’Brien Press).

The Judge’s Special Award – An Slipéar Gloine, written by debut children’s author Fearghas Mac Lochlainn and illustrated by Paddy Donnelly (Futa Fata).

The KPMG Junior Juries’ Award – Girls Who Slay Monsters by debut author Ellen Ryan, illustrated by Shona Shirley Macdonald (HarperCollins Ireland).

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Madame Lazare by Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin will make Irish publishing history this week, when the Irish language novel is launched at the HeadRead Literature Festival in Tallinn. Supported by Literature Ireland, the novel has been translated directly from Irish to Estonian by Indrek Ois.

Madame Lazare came to international prominence when it was nominated last year by Literature Ireland for the European Union Prize for Literature and received a Special Mention.

Speaking of the publication,Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin said “It is an extraordinary honour to have my words published in this beautiful Estonian edition and to see the book on display in bookshops in Tallinn alongside books by other festival participants such as Javier Cercas and Graeme Macrae Burnet. I am extremely grateful to the translator Indrek Ois, the Estonian publisher Krista Kaer at Varrak Publishing House and to the director of Literature Ireland, Sinéad Mac Aodha, for their support of my work.

Sinéad Mac Aodha said “Promoting Madame Lazare has been a joy.To have the book translated directly to Estonian from the Irish language makes this a unique and valuable publishing project and gives extra meaning to Literature Ireland’s promotional work. We are delighted that Estonian readers on the very far side of Europe now have access to Tadhg’s beautiful book in their own language. We congratulate everyone involved with this very special translation.”

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Paula Greevy-Lee performs her own one-woman show A Rare Journey, Nora Joyce’s Odyssey. Beginning in Zurich five years after Joyce’s death, we meet Nora as she prepares to meet an American writer for lunch. Wary of maybe saying too much, she rehearses the highs and lows of her adventurous life with Joyce, giving us a real sense of her quick wit, sharp tongue, love of music and singing, as well as something of the many struggles the family experienced as they moved across Europe, sometimes fleeing from war, sometimes from unpaid rent. The play completely disentangles Nora from her fictional alter, Molly Bloom, and gives us a portrait of a remarkable Irish woman. Smock Alley Theatre, June 13th – 17th.

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The title of this year’s Hubert Butler essay competition is: ‘How far can we trust science?’

In an affectionate essay about the French ‘father of prehistory’ Jacques Boucher de Perthes, Hubert Butler quoted a characteristic pronouncement by his subject: “Science helps us to prove but prevents us understanding.’ Butler might not have subscribed completely to Boucher’s lofty dismissal, but he sustained a prescient scepticism about over-reliance on scientific formulae as applied to the problems and opportunities facing humanity, writes Prof Roy Foster, chair of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2023.

Since the inauguration of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize in 2018, previous subjects in this series have explored ideas such as cosmopolitanism, internationalism, group identity, the fall-out from global pandemic, and the increasing abuse of political power in autocratic regimes. For the 2023 competition, the judges decided to target the enormous challenges presented by scientific advances such as artificial intelligence, and the uses and misuses to which such developments might be put. The question, put at its simplest, projects a theme whose relevance has grown exponentially in the 21st century, but whose roots can be traced back to the Enlightenment and beyond. It also raises preoccupations and issues memorably exposed and analysed through Butler’s consummate use of the essay form.

The entry details are here: hubertbutleressayprize.com

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Caffè Nero has launched the Nero Book Awards: a new set of multi-category awards celebrating the craft of great writing and the joy of reading. With a total prize value of £50k, the Nero Book Awards will highlight outstanding books of the year across four categories: Children’s Fiction, Fiction, Debut Fiction and Non-Fiction.

Established as a not-for-profit, the awards have a mission to point readers of all ages and interests in the direction of outstanding books. Their focus will be on books by writers based in the UK and Ireland. They will be administered by The Booksellers Association, the trade organisation that represents booksellers across the country. It will be run day-to-day by a management team who have previously worked on all major UK book awards.

The Nero Book Awards are a welcome replacement for the Costa Book Awards, formerly the Whitbread, which ended last year.

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The #BookTok community of authors, readers and fans is transforming the publishing world: propelling new authors into the mainstream, reviving much loved classics, inspiring a new generation of bookworms and helping to boost print book sales. In the past year, the #BookTok hashtag has grown more than 160 per cent to over 138 billion views.

In celebration and recognition of the titles, authors, content and creators that have made the unique BookTok ecosystem what it is, the TikTok Book Awards for the UK and Ireland have been launched, giving the community the chance to vote for the winning books, authors and creators in-app.

The awards will recognise the community’s favourite authors, books and creators, through categories inspired by the BookTok ecosystem. The longlist of nominees will be curated based on BookTok data as well as publisher contributions, then be reviewed by a judging panel, including TikTok creators Coco (@cultofbooks) and Ben (@bcemercer) industry experts such Trâm-Anh Doan, Head of Social Media, Bloomsbury, authors like Candice Brathwaite and special guest judges including Annie Macmanus and Elizabeth Day.

The winners will be decided by the TikTok community in the UK and Ireland, through an in-app vote that will go live in July, with all winners being crowned in August.

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The Society of Authors has announced shortlists for the ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Paul Torday Memorial Prize, the Queen’s Knickers Award, the McKitterick Prize, the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize and the inaugural shortlist for the ADCI Literary Prize.

The shortlists feature 36 writers, poets and illustrators with a host of thematic and formal concerns – from ‘courageous attempts to give new shape to the novel’ (Betty Trask judge Alex Preston), to poetry of personal and cultural histories of suffering, to illustrated works for children of ‘high quality silliness’ to ‘force a chuckle out of the most hardened parent’ (Queen’s Knickers judge Ken Wilson-Max).

The winners, to be announced on June 29th at Southwark Cathedral, will share a prize fund of over £100,000. The awards ceremony will be presented by Joanne Harris and keynote speaker Val McDermid. The event will be livestreamed and tickets for the in-person event can be purchased from the Society of Authors website.

The first shortlist for the ADCI Literary Prize, celebrating positive representation of disability in literature, is included this year. The prize is open to authors with a disability or chronic illness, for novels including a disabled or chronically ill character or characters. Fiona Scott-Barrett’s shortlisted The Exit-Facility – an ‘engaging’ novel featuring a world you ‘might expect to see in Black Mirror’ (Judge Vikki Patis) – notably marks a self-published novel being celebrated among our shortlists. Braver by Deborah Jenkins (Fairlight Books) and Spear by Nicola Griffith (Tordotcom Publishing) are also shortlisted.

This year’s Paul Torday Memorial Prize shortlist features Murder Before Evensong (Weidenfeld & Nicholson), a whodunnit crime novel by BBC Radio 4 presenter and Strictly Come Dancing star, the Reverend Richard Coles. The Hay Festival Book of the Year, Lesson’s in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, also features on this year’s Torday shortlist and Louise Kennedy’s Nibbies Debut Novel of the Year Trespasses makes an appearance on this year’s McKitterick Prize shortlist. Niamh Mac Cabe’s Sky an Iris and Ciarán Folan’s A Day have been shortlisted for the ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award for a short story by a writer who has had at least one short story accepted for publication. David Park’s Spies in Canaan is shortlisted for the Gordon Bowler Volcano Prize for a novel focusing on the experience of travel away from home.

Aamina Ahmad’s assured debut novel The Return of Faraz Ali is shortlisted for both the McKitterick Prize and the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize – a multi-layered crime novel in which ‘the decaying grandeur of the courtesans of Lahore’ is ‘lovingly depicted’ (McKitterick judge Selma Dabbagh).

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Fíona Scarlett, author of the critically acclaimed Boys Don’t Cry, has been appointed Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick for the coming academic year.

Boys Don’t Cry was published by Faber & Faber in 2021 and was shortlisted for ‘Newcomer of the Year’ in the Irish Book Awards, and the Kate O’Brien first novel award.

She joins a teaching team that includes Donal Ryan, Kit de Waal, Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, Emily Cullen, and Eoin Devereux. Scarlett, who is from Dublin but lives in Co Kildare, holds an MLitt in creative writing with distinction from the University of Glasgow, was awarded a Literature Bursary through the National Arts Council Ireland in 2021 and is completing her year as Writer in Residence at Maynooth University, in conjunction with Kildare Libraries and Art Services. Fíona is now working on her second novel.

“I am absolutely thrilled to have been appointed as Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick,” said Scarlett. “What a privilege to be working alongside the renowned UL creative writing team, a faculty not only known for its talent and excellence, but for its compassion, empathy, and dedication to craft. I am incredibly excited for the year ahead, and especially looking forward to meeting with all the wonderful students and getting to know them and their work. What an honour that is.”