Loose Leaves: Nuala O'Faolain was given the royal treatment earlier this week in Paris when she won the Prix Femina Étranger for the French edition of her book The Story of Chicago May.
The prize was created more than a century ago by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie Heureuse,now known as Femina. The award is decided each year by an all-female jury. Previous winners include Joyce Carol Oates, Hugo Hamilton, who won for The Speckled People, and Magda Szabó.
There is no cash prize; the reward is prestige - and high visibility on the French literary scene.
The book tells the story of May Duignan, who left the family farm in Co Longford in 1890 with the family savings and booked passage to the US, where she became a top crook. But the book has a French strand to it too. With her lover Eddie Guerin, Chicago May went to Paris to carry out a robbery, for which they ended up serving time.
"The book is in every bookshop window in France and I wish May knew - she spent a lot of time in French jails for her part in her lover's burglary of the American Express office, still in the Rue Scribe, in 1903," said O'Faolain, who was formally told she'd won when the ladies of the jury finished their lunch in the Hôtel de Crillon on Monday. The winner doesn't get lunch, but is brought in at the coffee stage for all the hoopla.
Unfortunately for May - whose underworld adventures took her to Chicago, New York, London, Cairo and Buenos Aires as well as Paris, and of whom it was said she could bite the diamonds out of a man's tiepin without him noticing - she later became a drunk prostitute on the streets of Detroit in her 50s. She did manage to write her life story, however, published in 1928. She died shortly afterwards, on her wedding day.
O'Faolain says that, while the book imagines passages in May's life when it has to, it is also solidly researched and uses bits of her own experience as well. "I don't believe in classic biography. I think they're all subjective, that all biography is a form of autobiography. That seems to have interested French readers very much - that it is a book about writing the book, as well as a narrative about her. " The book is published in France by an independent house called Éditions Wespieser, which is run by Sabine Wespieser.
Stinging tales for winter
It is commendable to read in the editorial of the latest issue of The Stinging Fly that, for each new issue, they do what they can to get through the submission file, reading each poem and story before selecting the best for publication. Their litmus test is simple: "Work gets selected for the magazine because the writer has made it so good we've had to say yes." The current issue also has a piece by writer Philip Ó Ceallaigh, who on Thursday won the Fiction Award of the inaugural Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards (see On the Town, W8), run in association with the Irish Writers' Centre, for his short story collection Notes From a Turkish Whorehouse (Penguin Ireland).
In The Stinging Fly, Ó Ceallaigh writes about one of his first passions, the novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac, an author who became his hero when he bought the book at age 16. He read it again when he was nearly 30 and had lived in different countries, including the United States, and he found it moved him in a new way. "It was nothing less than a passionate description of a search for redemption in a world that does not believe in this quest. It was not only about innocence and energy and ecstasy, but about the losing fight to sustain this state."
There's also an interview with novelist Claire Kilroy, who describes the moment of Faber & Faber accepting her first novel, All Summer, as possibly the most significant moment of her life so far, and the happiest. "It felt like you'd been frozen for a very long time, and suddenly you were thawed." She didn't know what would become of her if they didn't accept it, and that state of panic turned to one of immense relief. Then, after publication, "I don't know why, but I expected to be slagged off, because it's Ireland. I anticipated snideness." Happily, however, none was forthcoming.
While a previous generation of writers had reflected back on their bleak decade, the 1950s, for Kilroy it was the "horrible time" of the 1980s - "Dublin was exhilarating in the 1980s, for all its bleakness" - which provoked the desire to transcend it through writing. The Dublin suburb of Clontarf doesn't come out too well, either. "I went to school in Clontarf, which was so small-minded, and so dreary." As for writing, she says "I'm in it for life now." The winter issue of The Stinging Fly is out now, €6.