Poet and a classical guitar musician Gerard Donovan has won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award at Listowel Writers' Week for his first novel Schopenhauer's Telescope.
Author John McGahern, who won the award two years ago, made the announcement at a gala function for the official opening of the 35th writers' festival in Listowel last night.
Four of the five novels on this year's short list for the €10,000 prize were first novels.Other first novels on the shortlist included The Eskimo In The Net by Gerard Beirne, All Summer by Clare Kilroy and An Evening Of Long Goodbyes by Paul Murray. Skin Of Dreams, by Evelyn Conlon, was also shortlisted. The adjudicators, Mr John F. Deane and Ms Emer O'Kelly, compiled the shortlist from over 50 entries received.
Set in a European village in the midst of a civil war, Schopenhauer's Telescope deals with the complexity of the human spirit. The book focuses on two characters on opposing sides, a baker digging a hole and a teacher watching. It has been described as part love story and part theatre of the absurd. Mr Donovan, who was born in Wexford and grew up in Galway, currently lives in New York.
John McGahern, who won the award for his novel That They May Face The Rising Sun, said Listowel was "more fortunate than most places. The law of singularity seems to have prevailed here as well, since the late John B. Keane told us that when he and other distinguished presences took their walks in the attractive town square, they often moved in different circles."