The success of three Galway female writers places women firmly at the centre of the literary world after receiving nominations for major literary prizes.
Mary Costello – originally from Menlough and now living in Dublin – is shortlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award; Spiddal-based poet Liz Quirke for the Hennessy Literary Awards and Galway city author Lisa McInerney for the Baileys Women’s Prize.
Mary Costello is the only Irish author shortlisted for the lucrative; International Dublin Literary Award – formerly known as the IMPAC award.
Her previous 2012 collection of short stories ‘The China Factory’ was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and her stories have been published in various anthologies and broadcast on both RTÉ and BBC radio.
But it’s her breakthrough novel, Academy Street, that has gained her international attention and admiration from fellow writers and industry insiders.
The book explores the life of its leading protagonist Tess, spanning six decades, from her childhood in 1940’s rural Ireland to emigration and life in America.
The Guardian compared it to Colm Tóibín‘s highly acclaimed ‘Brooklyn’, and described Costello as “a writer of huge ability”, whose “writing is so controlled and convincing” and whose “command of language and tone was all her own”.
Public libraries around the world nominate titles for the IMPAC. Entries from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA have also been shortlisted for the prize.
Lisa McInerney is another Galway author with a powerful voice, hailed by the Irish Times as ‘arguably the most talented writer at work in Ireland today’.
Her book, ‘The Glorious Heresies’ was named as a book of the year by The Irish Times, Sunday Independent and Sunday Business Post in 2015. It has been long-listed for the 2016 Dylan Thomas Prize and the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
The novel follows five characters who exist on the fringes of Ireland’s post-crash society, and who are affected by a “messy murder”.
Through the chaos created by five Corkonian rebels – a drug dealer, a sex worker, an unrepentant penitent, a gangland boss and a failed family man – ‘The Glorious Heresies’ explores family, shame, regret and redemption in modern Ireland .
In the UK, McInerney received a glowing five star review from The Telegraph, who described the Galway author’s first novel, as a spectacular debut – “Tough and tender, gothic and lyrical, it is a head-spinning, stomach-churning state-of-the-nation novel about a nation falling apart.”
Liz Quirke, a Spiddal-based writer originally from Tralee, has also been nominated for her achievements – in poetic literature.
Her poems, ‘Nurture’ and ‘Juno’, have been shortlisted for the 45th Hennessy Literary Awards in the Emerging Poetry category. The event will take place in the Irish Museum of Modern Art on April 28.
Quirke’s poetry has appeared in The Irish Times, Southword, Revival Literary Journal, The Stony Thursday Book and other various publications.
She won the 2015 Poems for Patience Competition here in Galway and was Shortlisted for the 2015 Cúirt New Writing Prize. Liz is currently working on her first collection.
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