The Irish Times new fiction reviewer Sarah Gilmartin has won the Belfast Book Festival’s Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award, while Alan Weadick won the Poetry Award. Both have previously been published in The Irish Times as winners of the monthly New Irish Writing competition.
Organised by the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast, the awards, judged by Lucy Caldwell and Moyra Donaldson, are aimed at writers working towards their first full collection of poetry, short stories, or a novel. The awards attracted a record 441 submissions for poetry and 324 entries for the short story award.
Gilmartin’s winning story, The Wife, explores a #MeToo-themed episode from the point of view of the perpetrator’s partner. The writer said: “Awards like the Mairtín Crawford are great because they give you the impetus to write. Writing can be a tough old business, with lots of ups and downs, and very little certainty. The recognition from winning the award is good for the soul, and the money affords you time and space away from other work to persist with writing projects, to go deep into the draft.”
The winners each receive £1,000 and a three-night stay at the Co Down writing retreat The River Mill.
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The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead is this week’s Irish Times Eason offer. Readers who purchase a copy of The Irish Time s on Saturday at any store can buy the Pulitzer Prize winning novel for only €4.99, a saving of €6.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s compelling new novel Rodham creates an alternative life for the Clintons. She talks to Róisín Ingle in the Magazine, In Ticket, Peter Murphy talks to David Mitchell about his new novel, Utopia Avenue. Reviews incude Geoff Roberts on Prisoners of History: What Monuments to the Second World War Tell Us About Our History and Ourselves by Keith Lowe; Rosita Boland on The Chiffon Trenches by André Leon Talley; Paschal Donohoe on Martin Sandbu’s The Economics of Belonging; Kathleen MacMahon Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers; Martina Evans on Post-Colonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz; Paul Clements on local history books; Sarah Gilmartin on Tennis Lessons by Susannah Dickey; and Declan Hughes on the best new crime fiction.
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Tramp Press has acquired Irish and British rights to The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy.
The book identifies seven “sins” women and girls are socialised to avoid – anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence and lust. With essays on each, Eltahawy encourages women worldwide to defy, disobey and disrupt the patriarchy.
“The Seven Necessary Sins is timely, incisive and challenging work. Mona Eltahawy calls upon a range of stories to create her arguments, and the effect is fiercely intelligent and compelling. This is exactly the kind of story we want to tell at Tramp Press: we love great risk-taking storytelling, shaped by vibrant prose,” said Lisa Coen, co-publisher at Tramp Press.
“I am thrilled to be published by Tramp Press,’ said Eltahawy. “A feminist press is the perfect home for my writing. Our work as feminists is to dismantle patriarchy and all the oppressions it uses against us all women – cisgender and transgender. Tramp Press is the perfect house to amplify me as I say F*ck the Patriarchy!”
