Books newsletter: Irish bookshops and publishers on awards shortlists

In this Saturday’s Irish Times there is a Q&A with Carmel McMahon, about her memoir, In Ordinary Time, and its inspirations.

Reviews are Vic Duggan on It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders and The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolf; Sarah Moss on Two Sisters by Blake Morrison; Nicholas Allen on Finding My Wild by Kathy Donaghy; Declan Burke on the best new crime fiction; Anne Fogarty on Flann O’Brien: Acting out Edited by Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs; Orla Tinsley on Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst; Ruth McKee on Are You Happy Now by Hanna Jameson; Kevin Power on Affinities by Brian Dillon; Martina Evans on The Art and Ideology of Terence MacSwiney: Caught in a Living Flame, edited by Gabriel Doherty, Fiona Brennan and Neil Buttimer; Sara Keating on the best new children’s books; and Sarah Gilmartin on Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein.

This weekend’s Irish Times Eason offer is The Colony by Audrey Magee. You can buy a copy of this Booker Prize-longlisted Irish best-seller with your newspaper for €4.99, a saving of €6.

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The 2023 Island of Ireland finalists for The British Book Awards 2023 Independent Bookshop of the Year are Halfway Up the Stairs in Greystones, Co Wicklow and Little Acorns Bookstore in Derry. The bookshops will compete to win their region first, which will be announced on March 16th, before contending for the overall prize, announced at The British Book Awards winner ceremony at Grosvenor House on May 15th.

Lilliput Press, New Island, Little Island and Banshee Press have been selected as Country Finalists for The Bookseller’s Small Press of the Year as part of their British Book Awards.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has announced its 2023 longlist, which features two Irish titles, The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan, published by The Lilliput Press and Tuskar Rock, and These Days by Lucy Caldwell, published by Faber.

Twelve novels are in contention for the £25,000 prize, with settings spanning the globe and the centuries: from ancient Tahiti to Australia and Tasmania at the dawn of colonisation; from seventeenth-century Massachusetts to the 19th century literary salons of Europe; from the shores of Suffolk to the quiet countryside of Thomas Hardy’s Dorset; from the gold-rush-giddy American south to Belfast under siege during the Blitz; and from the cramped streets of 18th-century London to the sogginess of an Irish bog in the 1950s.

A shortlist – usually six books – will be announced in April, and a winner announced in mid-June at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland.

Rescuing Titanic, illustrated and written by Flora Delargy and published by Wide Eyed Editions, has made the 2023 Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration longlist.

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Submissions are being invited for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2023. This award is for the best Novel by an Irish author published between February 1st, 2022 and January 31st, 2023, with a prize of €20,000 for the winning author.

Award-winning journalist Manveen Rana and Emmy award-winning British writer Patrick Gale adjudicate this year’s award.

Catherine Keogh of sponsor Kerry Group commented, “It is a huge honour to support the award for Novel of the Year again this year. Irish writers have consistently proven themselves to be innovators in storytelling and this award celebrates their achievements. It is important to recognise and support the arts in Ireland, which are of particular importance in Listowel – the town where Kerry Group began its own story over 50 years ago. We want to wish all those entering the awards the very best of luck.”

The 2022 award was presented to Claire Keegan for her novel Small Things Like These.

A shortlist will be announced in April and will highlight the five selected shortlisted novels. The winner will be presented with their prize at the opening ceremony of Listowel Writers’ Week Literary Festival on May 31st.

Poetry Ireland is delighted to announce the five recipients of I bhFad i gCéin, a programme of international residencies based in five cities across the globe funded by the Arts Council. The recipients are Liz Houchin, Nithy Kasa, Roisin Kelly, James Conor Patterson and Molly Twomey. Taking place in Edinburgh, New York, Montana, Berlin and Manchester respectively, the programme will provide these five Irish poets with a two-to-three-week residency in one of the international locations plus a bursary of €2,000.

I bhFad i gCéin, which means “far-afield” is inspired by the poetic spirit of adventure and aims to directly invest in the careers and development of Irish poets by enhancing their networks and experiences.

The Residencies will be hosted by Cave Canem in New York, Haus fur Poesie/poesiefestival in Berlin, Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, Quarantine in Manchester and Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana. Each residency will allow poets to immerse themselves in their surroundings and each location was chosen to reflect the growing and diverse community of poets living and working in Ireland.

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On December 21st, 1940, KGB officers arrived at a Moscow hospital and arrested a young, idealistic Irishman who had arrived 12 years earlier to attend the Lenin School and study Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Padraic Breslin was questioned for six months before being sentenced to eight years in the Soviet labour camps of the Gulag. While in a holding camp near the city of Kazan waiting to be transferred to the Gulag, Breslin died.

He left three children: a daughter Irina and a son Genrikh, with his Russian wife Yekaterina Kreizer, both of whom died in Russia and a daughter Mairead, born to Irish translator Margaret McMackin, whom Breslin managed to help escape from Moscow during Stalin’s terror.

In a unique contribution to Ireland-USSR historical links Mairead Breslin Kelly, born in Belfast in 1938, who now lives in Dublin, has translated the records of her father’s interrogation process into Irish in Ceistiúcháin, 264pp, Coiscéim Publishers, €15. The book is available at An Siopa Leabhair, 6 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2; An Ceathrú Póilín, 216 Falls Road Belfast; An Café Liteartha, Dingle, Co Kerry. It can be ordered from ÁIS Unit 3 Dunshaughlin Business Park Co Meath ais@forasnagaeilge.ie

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University College Cork celebrates 10 years of its acclaimed MA in Creative Writing this year, and to mark the occasion a scholarship will be awarded to a writer of exceptional promise who comes from a traditionally underrepresented area of society.

UCC’s MA in Creative Writing was founded in 2013 and is directed by award-winning novelist Dr Eibhear Walshe. To date the MA programme has graduated 150 students from Ireland, the US, Canada, France, Scotland, Poland, Malta and Cyprus. Creative Writing needs an ecosystem to thrive including publishers, book shops and – most importantly of all – readers. Many of those readers, writers and publishers will join UCC Creative Writing graduates in the Aula Maxima tomorrow Thursday evening (16 February).

John Banville, Zadie Smith, Nick Laird, Colum McCann, Richard Ford, Victoria Kennefick and Olivia Fitzsimons, thanks to donor support, have all offered readings and workshops throughout ten years of Creative Writing at UCC. Now thanks continued donor support the Miriam Cotter MA Scholarship will be awarded to a writer of exceptional promise who comes from a traditionally underrepresented area of society. More details on the scholarship can be found here.