Anne Enright, one of 34 authors on the longlist for the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction (Image: The Guardian)
A longlist of 34 authors for the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction was announced this week.
Among the various (necessarily imprecise) criteria for the award are that the author has:
- an internationally recognised body of work, and
- demonstrated commitment to engaging with the public, the media and the literary sector
There are 21 men and 13 women on the list, including former Booker Prize winners John Banville, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle and also William Trevor, who has made the shortlist for the Booker five times but has never won.
Other Irish literary veterans (if that’s not too harsh) are Sebastian Barry, Patrick McCabe, Dermot Bolger and Edna O’Brien, while among the relative newcomers on the list are Eimear McBride, whose debut novel A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing won the Baileys Prize earlier this year, and Jaki McCarrick, who published her debut collection of stories, The Scattering, in 2013.
There is no more notable omission than Colm Tóibín, although there may be valid reasons for this – certainly, Tóibín was pictured at the launch of the laureateship last December, so his absence from the list of 34 writers below must have a basis in something we aren’t being told about in the publicity material.
There’s no doubt that the judging panel in phenomenally strong, chaired by poet Paul Muldoon and including his fellow Irish poet Paula Meehan, author Blake Morrison, this year’s IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Juan Gabriel Vasquez and Deborah Triesman, the New Yorker‘s fiction editor and producer of the New Yorker short story podcast, one of the best shows you could ever hope to listen to.
The Laureate for Irish Fiction will have a three year term (initially 2015-18), carries a €150,000 bursary and will see the laureate teach creative writing at UCD and New York University.
The first Laureate for Irish Fiction will be announced in January, and more info can be found on the Arts Council website here.
The full longlist for the Irish Laureate for Fiction:
- John Banville
- Sebastian Barry
- Dermot Bolger
- John Boyne
- Michael Coady
- Evelyn Conlon
- Peter Cunningham
- Emma Donoghue
- Roddy Doyle
- Catherine Dunne
- Christine Dwyer Hickey
- Anne Enright
- Hugo Hamilton
- Anne Haverty
- Jennifer Johnston
- Claire Keegan
- Tom Kilroy
- Ré O Laighleis
- Eimear McBride
- Patrick McCabe
- Colum McCann
- Jaki McCarrick
- Liam Mac Cóil
- John MacKenna
- Belinda McKeon
- Bernard MacLaverty
- Eoin McNamee
- Paul Murray
- Nuala Ní Chonchuir
- Edna O’Brien
- Joseph O’Connor
- Donal Ryan
- William Trevor
- Niall Williams
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