Recently we celebrated St Patrick’s Day. This occasion has become not just a celebration of the saint himself, but a day on which we celebrate Irish culture around the world. At YPRL, this means celebrating Irish writers and highlighting some great reads.
One of the marks of much Irish literature written in English is its intense musicality. Modernist literature of the early 20th century is indebted to writers W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The mid-20th century also offers rich voices, including the acerbic Flann O’Brien and the frank and adventurous Edna O’Brien—O’Brien’s final novel Girl is available in the collection. This novel caps off a nearly sixty-year career in which O'Brien published short stories, novels, plays, memoirs and other exciting work.
In the contemporary moment, Sally Rooney has been dubbed the first great novelist of her generation. Her first two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People, focus on the milieu of people like Rooney herself—Irish students attending University in Dublin. Both have been adapted as television series. Her subsequent novels, Beautiful World, Where are You and Intermezzo see Rooney spread her wings as she moves beyond student years. Her works are notable for the way they capture how we communicate with each other in the contemporary world, as well as for her characters’ interest in ideas.
Another Irish writer to make her debut in recent year is Eimear McBride. Her stream-of-consciousness debut novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing was a breakout work of 2013 and is available in eBook format. McBride’s use of stream-of-consciousness brought comparisons to James Joyce at her debut, and she has since established herself as a significant voice in Irish fiction. YPRL's collection holds her subsequent novelsThe Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel, and The City Changes its Face as well as her nonfiction work Something Out of Place: Women and Disgust. A more recent fiction debut is Emilie Pine. Pine released the novel Ruth & Pen in 2022: like James Joyce’s landmark modernist novel Ulysses, this book is set in Dublin on a single day.
A number of Irish novelists have won the prestigious Booker Prize in the past several years including Anne Enright, Paul Lynch and John Banville. Enright writes novels and short stories that centre on the family, allowing this focus to address larger themes of the Irish experience. Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song sees the author explore dystopian fiction as he imagines an Ireland slipping into totalitarianism. John Banville has a dual identity as a writer: he won the Booker Prize for The Sea, a novel presented as the musings of an art historian in his journal. In other work, Banville also explores the genre of crime fiction through novels set in the 1950s featuring the central character of a pathologist, Quirke. Banville began writing these novels under the pen name Benjamin Black, but has published the last three of these novels under his own name. The latest of the Quirke novels is The Drowned.
Another prize-winning author is the short story writer Claire Keegan. Her recent novellas Small Things Like These, Foster and So Late in the Day have gained international attention, and both Foster and Small Things Like These have been adapted into feature films. Foster became the film The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin), available on DVD and through Kanopy: this work features the Irish language. As a result of her recent successes, her early short story collections Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields are newly available.
There are plenty of popular writers who capture elements of Irish life in their works: Maeve Binchy focused in her novels on small-town life and its textures of friendship and gossip. One of her best-known works is Circle of Friends, in which small-town friends end up at university in Dublin together. These steps from small-town life into the wider world bring a reassuring contour to the quest to find meaning in life, but for all the lessons learned in the wider world it is often the small places from which characters come that contain the kernels of experience that form them. Binchy’s works remain true because she sets out to tell stories of characters that readers care about.
Dervla McTiernan is an Irish-Australian crime writer. Born in County Cork, McTiernan now lives in Western Australia, though her crime fictions are still set in Ireland. Her novel, The Rúin , won the Ned Kelly award for best debut novel—the Ned Kelly awards are Australia’s premier prize for crime writing and true crime. McTiernan's novels The Scholar, The Good Turn, The Murder Rule and What Happened to Nina? are available in multiple formats, and her next novel, The Unquiet Grave, will be available soon.
Other writers of crime fiction with Irish connections include Tana French, John Connolly, Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty.