A Booker Prize winning novel, a new biography of James Connolly and a contender for next week's Whitbread Book of the Year award are among 18 titles shortlisted in three categories for the Irish Book Awards, the individual winners of which will be announced on March 1st.
Eileen Battersby,
Literary Correspondent
A Booker Prize winning novel, a new biography of James Connolly and a contender for next week's Whitbread Book of the Year award are among 18 titles shortlisted in three categories for the Irish Book Awards, the individual winners of which will be announced on March 1st. The new prizes, which have extended the Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year award, will be awarded in three categories. The Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year offers €10,000 to the winner.
John Banville's Booker Prize winning novel, The Sea, is again pitted against William Wall's This is the Country which made the Booker longlist. Brian Lynch's The Winner of Sorrow should present a strong challenge in a selection which also includes poet Nick Laird's debut Utterly Monkey, Mike McCormack's Notes from a Coma, and Lia Mills's Nothing Simple.
Argosy, an Irish book wholesaler and distributor, is sponsoring the non-fiction category, the Argosy Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year, worth €7,500. John McGahern's dark and lyric account of his love for his mother and his fear of his father, Memoir, and Brian Dillon's harrowing account of the death of his parents, In the Dark Room, dominate a shortlist which includes Fintan O'Toole's White Savage, a historical study of 18th century Irish adventurer Sir William Johnson, Donal Nevin's biography of James Connolly and a third memoir, All of These People, by Fergal Keane. Commentator David McWilliams is a surprise inclusion with his exposé of post-Celtic Tiger modern Ireland, The Pope's Children.
The Dublin Airport Authority Irish Children's Book of the Year, worth €5,000, should go to Kate Thompson's characteristically imaginative The New Policeman, already a Whitbread category winner. Also shortlisted is Siobhan Parkinson's Second Fiddle, Malachy Doyle's Dancing Tiger, John Quinn's Bill and Fred and Sam McBratney's Up The Wooden Hill, with Deirdre Madden's excellent Snakes Elbows the most likely threat to Thompson, three times winner of the Bisto Prize.
