In this Saturday’s Irish Times, Patrick Radden Keefe talks to Patrick Freyne about Gerry Adams, the Sacklers and his new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks.

Our reviews are: Geoffrey Roberts on Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short; Ruadhán Mac Cormaic on Zelensky by Serhii Rudenko; Michael Cronin on the best new translations; NJ McGarrigle on Money Men by Dan McCrum; Declan O’Driscoll on Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell; Neil Hegarty on Saint of Lost Things by Tish Delaney; Tom Lordan on Left Without a Handkerchief by Robert O’Byrne; Mary Hannigan on A Woman’s Game: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Women’s Football by Suzanne Wrack; Sally Hayden on When the Music’s Over by Gareth Owens; Ruth McKee on A Life of No Light Toil: The Anna Maria Fielding Hall Reader, edited by Marian Thérèse Keyes; Carmen Cavanagh by Annie Smithson; Pray for the Wanderer by Kate O’Brien; A Name for Himself by Catherine Dunne; and Another Alice by Lia Mills; and Sarah Gilmartin on A Certain Hunger by Chelsea Summers.

Saturday’s Irish Times Eason book offer is A Slow Fire Burning, the latest thriller by Paula Hawkins, just €4.99 when you buy the newspaper, a saving of €6.

Michael Longley has received one of the major European poetry prizes, the 2022 Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry, awarded every five years by the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. The prize is one of the most prestigious European arts awards, worth €250,000, and previous winners include WH Auden, Eugenio Montale and John Ashbery.

The Accademia dei Lincei said: “Longley is an extraordinary poet of landscape, particularly of the Irish West, which he observes with the delicate and passionate attention of an ecologist, and a tragic singer of Ireland and its dramatic history. But with his poetry he has also addressed the seduction, conquest, and fascination of love, as well as the shock of war in all ages, the tragedy of the Holocaust and of the gulags, and the themes of loss, grief and pity. For the extraordinary relevance of his themes and their cultural implications, as well as the very high stylistic quality of his oeuvre, the 2022 Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry is awarded to Michael Longley.”

Longley, who will accept the prize at a ceremony at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome on November 11th, said: “I write poems in solitude. It comes as a happy surprise when other people respond to them, and when they reach audiences beyond these shores. At this terrible time, it’s also a special honour to have my poetry recognised in a European and international context.”

Longley has previously been awarded the TS Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006, and Sidelines: Selected Prose in 2017. In 2001 Longley received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2017 he received the PEN Pinter Prize, and in 2018 the inaugural Yakamochi Medal. In 2015 he was made a Freeman of the City of Belfast, where he and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work. Jonathan Cape will publish a new collection of poems The Slain Birds, in September. His main Italian translator is the poet Paolo Febbraro, but the judges for the prize read his poems in English.

London-Irish poet Ian Duhig has been awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, worth £15,000, for his New and Selected Poems.

The judges were Christopher Reid, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Neel Mukherjee, William Waldegrave and Caroline Moore.

Duhig said: “I was truly elated when I was told that I’d been awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, not least because it was the first book of mine to have won any kind of prize. Checking out previous winners, I was also delighted to discover names like that of Michael Longley, who has been a major inspiration to me throughout my career, but also my old professor Geoffrey Hill, the brilliant Alice Oswald and the novelist Nicola Barker, who I see continuing a tradition from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, one of my very favourite books.

“It’s a real boost and now I’m pushing three score years and ten, an encouragement to keep writing. I would like to think it is also an encouragement to other writers who started late, like me, to feel they can still grow and learn and be recognised for that.”

Duhig won the 2001 Forward Best Single Poem Prize for The Lammas Hireling, which was the title poem of his first Picador collection in 2003. His other works are The Bradford Count (1991); The Mersey Goldfish (1994); Nominies (1998), all for Bloodaxe; The Speed of Dark (2007); Pandorama (2010); andThe Blind Roadmaker (2016).

Lisa McInerney has been announced as the new Editor of The Stinging Fly. She will be the magazine’s sixth editor in its 25-year history.

Lisa is the author of three novels: The Glorious Heresies, The Blood Miracles and The Rules of Revelation. She has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the RSL Encore Award and the Premio Edoardo Kihlgren for European literature. She has been a contributing editor to The Stinging Fly since 2017 and was guest editor of the Galway 2020 edition.

Lisa will take on the role of editor in August. In the meantime, she will continue working as lead editor on The Stinging Fly’s All New Writers Issue, which will be published in November.

“Lisa McInerney is a wonderful writer and outstanding editor who keenly shares The Stinging Fly’s vision and values,” said its founding editor and publisher, Declan Meade. “We look forward to working with Lisa and reading the new writing and new writers that we know she’ll discover, nurture and publish with style.”

“The Stinging Fly has done so much for me in terms of creative development and inclusion - so much for so many of us,” McInerney said. “I can think of few honours greater than the opportunity to continue that practice, to foster new writing and writers, and to provide that community that writers like me are so reliant on and grateful for. I’m both humbled and excited to be carrying on the work of the estimable Danny Denton (and Sally Rooney, Thomas Morris, and Declan Meade before him) and I can’t wait to see what’s in store.”

One, an imprint of Pushkin Press, is to publish Service, the second novel by Irish Times reviewer Sarah Gilmartin, next spring. It follows Gilmartin’s ‘joyously good’ (Sunday Times) debut Dinner Party, also published by One in 2021, which was shortlisted for best newcomer at the Irish Book Awards and the Kate O’Brien Award 2022.

Set in a high-end Dublin restaurant in the mid-2000s, Servic examines #MeToo, power and sexual politics from three perspectives: the waitress, the domineering chef, and the chef’s wife. Gilmartin captures the buzz and bustle of restaurant life and charts the escalation of banal bullying into something much darker. The three perspectives jostle with and contradict each other, revealing the deep and widespread impact of poisonous behaviour on individuals and the culture more broadly.

Gilmartin’s stories have been published in The Dublin Review, New Irish Writing and The Tangerine. Her awards include Best Playwright at the Short+Sweet Dublin Festival and the Máirtín Crawford Short Story Award.

Deputy publisher Laura Macaulay said: “This is the novel we need right now. Sarah Gilmartin writes with extraordinary empathy, yet never looks away, and she manages to pull it all off with a lightness and humour that makes this exceptional. I’m thrilled to be publishing this perfectly constructed, moving, and absolutely on point novel.”

Gilmartin said: “I’m excited to be working with the excellent team at Pushkin again for this new novel. To see their enthusiasm for Service has been really gratifying as the book is a good few years in the making, a story of the frenetic Irish restaurant world that I hope will resonate with readers everywhere.”

Harvill Secker has acquired My Father’s House, a literary thriller by Joseph O’Connor based on the true story of an Irish priest in the Vatican who rescued victims of the Nazis in Rome under the nose of his SS officer nemesis, and two further novels which will feature secondary characters from the new novel.

Set in September 1943, as German forces occupy Rome and SS officer Paul Hauptmann rules the city with terror, O’Connor’s novel follows Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty, who dedicates himself to helping those escaping from the Nazis. His home is Vatican City, the world’s smallest state, a neutral, independent country within Rome where the occupiers hold no sway. Here O’Flaherty brings together an unlikely band of friends to hide the vulnerable under the noses of the enemy. But as the Hauptmann’s net begins closing in on the Escape Line, the need for a terrifyingly audacious mission grows critical. By Christmastime, it’s too late to turn back.

Publisher Liz Foley said: ‘My Father’s House is a moving and masterful literary thriller – quite extraordinary in being a beautiful read and also intensely gripping. We can’t wait to bring readers to the wartime Rome Joe so brilliantly conjures and introduce them to the Escape Line.’

Joseph O’Connor said: ‘I am absolutely thrilled and excited that My Father’s House and the future Rome Escape Line novels will be published by Harvill Secker. Working on the book with editor Liz Foley has been a joy, and I deeply admire the skill and professionalism of the whole Harvill / PRH team. This novel means a lot to me and I couldn’t imagine it in better hands as it sets out to meet its readers.’

O’Connor’s books include eight previous novels: Cowboys and Indians (Whitbread Prize shortlist), Desperadoes, The Salesman, Inishowen, Star of the Sea (American Library Association Award, Irish Post Award for Fiction, France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi, Prix Madeleine Zepter for European novel of the year), Redemption Falls, Ghost Light (Dublin One City One Book Novel 2011) and The Thrill of it All. He received the 2012 Irish PEN Award for outstanding achievement in literature and in 2014 he was appointed Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. He was recently awarded the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Award for his contribution to Irish literature.

The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast has announced Victoria Kennefick as the winner of their 2022 Poetry Prize for a First Collection, supported by the Atlantic Philanthropies.

Victoria Kennefick has won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize for her first book, Eat Or We Both Starve, published by Carcanet (2021). She was awarded the prize at the Award Night readings in the Crescent Arts Centre Belfast on Thursday 23 June.

Kennefick is a poet, writer and teacher from Shanagarry, Co. Cork, now based in Co. Kerry. She holds a doctorate in English from University College Cork and studied at Emory University and Georgia College and State University as part of a Fulbright Scholarship. She is on the committee of Listowel Writers’ Week, Ireland’s longest-running literary festival.

Her debut collection Eat Or We Both Starve was named Book of the Year 2021 by the Guardian, the White Review, and the Sunday Independent (Dublin), and was listed in Best Poetry Books 2021 by the Irish Times and the Telegraph.

Victoria is a recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and has won a number of other awards including the 2013 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize 2021, the Costa Poetry Award 2021, and the Emerging Writer of the Year in the Dalkey Literary Awards 2022.