Nuala Ní Chonchúir's Blog, page 12
December 4, 2015
*Miss Emily* is a Best Book of 2015 in Canada
Very nice to be told (by super-sleuth writer Anakana Schofield) that Miss Emily is a Best Book of 2015 at Amazon Canada. The complete list is here.
December 3, 2015
MISS EMILY XMAS GIVEAWAY
It being almost Christmas, and nearly D-Day for postage abroad, I am giving away a copy of Miss Emily to one reader of this blog. I will post to anywhere in the world. All you have to do is leave a comment on this blogpost to say you would like to be in the draw. Simples. (And then come back on Sunday to see if you have won!)
December 2, 2015
PICS FROM BOOK AWARDS
I keep meaning to do this and I keep getting distracted by writing, book club chats, deadlines, editing, reading, (The Gingerman!!) etc. etc. So, a few pics from the Irish Book Awards night. It was a good one!
Hubby and self
Johnny Depp (via videolink) congratulating JP Donleavy on his lifetime acheivement win
Husb et moi, by Ger Holland
Pre-ceremony - nerves!
Bressie, who was the talk of the ladies on the night
Being interviewed by Evelyn O'Rourke
With the beauteous Belinda McKeon
Another TV interview (dunno who she was...)
Waiting for dinner...
With Zoe Comyns and Sinéad Gleeson
And you can watch the hour-long special on RTÉ (I waffle briefly to Evelyn O'Rourke at the beginning) here.
Hubby and self
Johnny Depp (via videolink) congratulating JP Donleavy on his lifetime acheivement win
Husb et moi, by Ger Holland
Pre-ceremony - nerves!
Bressie, who was the talk of the ladies on the night
Being interviewed by Evelyn O'Rourke
With the beauteous Belinda McKeon
Another TV interview (dunno who she was...)
Waiting for dinner...
With Zoe Comyns and Sinéad GleesonAnd you can watch the hour-long special on RTÉ (I waffle briefly to Evelyn O'Rourke at the beginning) here.
November 25, 2015
CÚIRT NEW WRITING PRIZE 2016
The Cúirt New Writing Prize, in memory of Lena Maguire, is now open for submissions. Entries should be sent via email to: info@cuirt.ie
There is a €500 cash prize for the winner in each category and an opportunity to read at the Cúirt/Over the Edge Showcase event at Cúirt 2016. This years judges are Elaine Feeney (poetry) and Declan Meade (Fiction).
Young Cúirt (Ages 12-17)The winner will receive €100 cash prize and they will have the opportunity to read at the 2016 Cúirt Labs in April.
The guidelines for both adult and youth submissions are as follows: Poetry entries must consist of 3 poems under 50 lines each, and fiction pieces may be up to 2000 words. Entries in both English and Irish are welcome. Writers submitting work should not have had a collection published in the category in which they enter.
The entry fee for each submission is €10, this can be paid via the Paypal button at: www.cuirt.ie. When emailing submissions, please include the unique transaction ID and the account owners name. Entries should be sent via email to: info@cuirt.ie
The closing date for submissions is Thursday 28 January 2016 at 5pm. For further information see: www.cuirt.ie
There is a €500 cash prize for the winner in each category and an opportunity to read at the Cúirt/Over the Edge Showcase event at Cúirt 2016. This years judges are Elaine Feeney (poetry) and Declan Meade (Fiction).
Young Cúirt (Ages 12-17)The winner will receive €100 cash prize and they will have the opportunity to read at the 2016 Cúirt Labs in April.
The guidelines for both adult and youth submissions are as follows: Poetry entries must consist of 3 poems under 50 lines each, and fiction pieces may be up to 2000 words. Entries in both English and Irish are welcome. Writers submitting work should not have had a collection published in the category in which they enter.
The entry fee for each submission is €10, this can be paid via the Paypal button at: www.cuirt.ie. When emailing submissions, please include the unique transaction ID and the account owners name. Entries should be sent via email to: info@cuirt.ie
The closing date for submissions is Thursday 28 January 2016 at 5pm. For further information see: www.cuirt.ie
November 20, 2015
November 16, 2015
SUNDAY INDO FEATURES IBA NOVEL OF THE YEAR S/LIST
Books: Real life,love and monsters
The shortlist for the Eason Book Club Novel of the Year award shows the depth and quality of Irish fiction
By Deirdre Conroy
A wonderful way to herald the festive season is to celebrate our home-grown literary luminaries and have all sorts of book categories and shortlists to talk about and titles to mull over.
The Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards bring together the entire book community - readers, authors, booksellers, publishers and librarians. While all else around us might still be feeling the pinch of austerity, the Irish public will always love a good book. That is what makes these awards so special and why your vote counts.
The prestigious Novel of the Year award is sponsored by Eason and recognises the depth and quality of Irish fiction. Previous winners include international Man Booker Prize recipients Roddy Doyle for The Guts, John Banville for Ancient Life and Anne Enright for The Gathering. Colum McCann won the award in 2004 for Dancer, while Emma Donoghue won in 2010 for her highly acclaimed Room.Last year, Mary Costello's quietly tragic tale Academy Street took the prize. In the past, the late John McGahern, Sebastian Barry, Neil Jordan, Ronan Bennett and Pat McCabe have all been honoured.This year's nominees are a satisfying shortlist including fresh names, providing local and global narratives, all classic in their own way. Nuala O'Connor and Kevin Barry create fictional accounts of real characters. Belinda McKeon and Anne Enright focus on the minutiae of fractured Irish relationships. Meanwhile, Edna O'Brien and Paul Murray tackle some international monsters.
TenderBelinda McKeonPan MacMillan/Picador
McKeon's second novel, Tender, evokes Dublin in 1998 on the cusp of social media saturation. Set in Trinity College, in a flat on Baggot Street and a couple of pubs, the story focuses on Catherine Reilly, who has left her native Longford to embark on her studies in Trinity. Her friendship with James Flynn, a gay aspiring artist, gallops into an all-consuming obsession for her. Dark and compulsive desire is the central theme of this pure, spare novel. The Guardian praised McKeon's "immersive, unflinching yet humane portrait of Catherine (which) makes Tender richly nuanced and utterly absorbing." McKeon now lives in New York.
Miss EmilyNuala O'ConnorSandstone Press
The enigmatic life of Emily Dickinson holds a deep fascination for writers and readers alike. Nuala O'Connor has anglicised her name from Ni Chonchuir for the American market and has taken on the challenge of reimagining the reclusive poet's life through her relationship with an 18-year-old Irish maid, Ada Concannon. Ada is from Dublin and her story is narrated in alternate chapters, providing a lyrical counterpoint to the period tone of Dickinson's voice. The two women find common ground through a love of nature and baking. As the poet hardly ever left her house in Amherst, it is the two female personalities that enrich the novel. Born in 1970, O'Connor has also published poetry, fiction and short stories, and lives in Galway.
The Green RoadAnne EnrightJonathan Cape
The Green Road is Enright's sixth novel. Born in 1962 in Dublin, she won both the Novel of the Year award and the Booker Prize for The Gathering. Enright is also our first Laureate of Irish Fiction. In The Green Road, she continues to probe the fault lines of family life. Deeply disenchanted characters vent their disappointment in a manner only Enright can channel.In a tale that spans 25 years, Dan Madigan returns to his childhood home in west Clare, travelling the eponymous Green Road which runs through the Burren with glimpses of the Atlantic ahead. There is beauty and darkness, hypocrisy and humility; it wouldn't be an Irish novel without them.
The Mark and The VoidPaul MurrayHamish Hamilton
The Mark and the Void is about the financial crisis and is Murray's third novel. Claude is a French investment banker based in Dublin. Murray's depiction of the city is one few of us would recognise or want to remember.The other characters are French, German, Greek, Russian and Australian, giving the book a sense of anywhere, except when Claude finds himself on an unexpected journey: "And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, exophthalmic … " The author of Skippy Dies has faced down the melodrama of our financial crisis and searched for meaning beyond.
BeatleboneKevin BarryCanongate
Intrigued by John Lennon's purchase in 1967 of Dorinish Island in Clew Bay, Kevin Barry explores how the story might have played out through the perspective of Lennon's fictitious driver, Cornelius O'Grady.It is 1978 and Lennon, aged 37, wants to retreat to the island, delve into his creative pool and do some primal screaming. A shaman is needed to negotiate the strange airs of the west coast, and O'Grady obliges.Car and boat journeys around Mulranny and Newport nurture the psychedelic mythology. Lennon's mythic quest through the doors of perception define this book, which was making waves before it went on sale.
The Little Red ChairsEdna O'BrienFaber & Faber
Edna O'Brien, the doyenne of Irish writing, published her 24th novel, The Little Red Chairs, this year. Evidently based on Radovan Karadzic ("the Butcher of Bosnia"), a dark stranger comes to the fictional town of Cloonoila.Dr Vladimir Dragan is ostensibly a healer and sex therapist from Montenegro. The local beauty, Fidelma, seeks help with fertility problems and falls in love with the mysterious Balkan.But Vlad is a Serbian war criminal and his unveiling has global significance together with horrific consequences for Fidelma. O'Brien confronts evil head on, and typically shines a spotlight on an Irish rural community that punishes a woman who has broken the tribal rules.The Sunday Times praised The Little Red Chairs as "a timely and defiant book".
To vote please visit www.irishbookawards.ie Voting ends the 19th at midnight. One vote per email address.
The shortlist for the Eason Book Club Novel of the Year award shows the depth and quality of Irish fiction
By Deirdre Conroy
A wonderful way to herald the festive season is to celebrate our home-grown literary luminaries and have all sorts of book categories and shortlists to talk about and titles to mull over.
The Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards bring together the entire book community - readers, authors, booksellers, publishers and librarians. While all else around us might still be feeling the pinch of austerity, the Irish public will always love a good book. That is what makes these awards so special and why your vote counts.
The prestigious Novel of the Year award is sponsored by Eason and recognises the depth and quality of Irish fiction. Previous winners include international Man Booker Prize recipients Roddy Doyle for The Guts, John Banville for Ancient Life and Anne Enright for The Gathering. Colum McCann won the award in 2004 for Dancer, while Emma Donoghue won in 2010 for her highly acclaimed Room.Last year, Mary Costello's quietly tragic tale Academy Street took the prize. In the past, the late John McGahern, Sebastian Barry, Neil Jordan, Ronan Bennett and Pat McCabe have all been honoured.This year's nominees are a satisfying shortlist including fresh names, providing local and global narratives, all classic in their own way. Nuala O'Connor and Kevin Barry create fictional accounts of real characters. Belinda McKeon and Anne Enright focus on the minutiae of fractured Irish relationships. Meanwhile, Edna O'Brien and Paul Murray tackle some international monsters.
TenderBelinda McKeonPan MacMillan/Picador
McKeon's second novel, Tender, evokes Dublin in 1998 on the cusp of social media saturation. Set in Trinity College, in a flat on Baggot Street and a couple of pubs, the story focuses on Catherine Reilly, who has left her native Longford to embark on her studies in Trinity. Her friendship with James Flynn, a gay aspiring artist, gallops into an all-consuming obsession for her. Dark and compulsive desire is the central theme of this pure, spare novel. The Guardian praised McKeon's "immersive, unflinching yet humane portrait of Catherine (which) makes Tender richly nuanced and utterly absorbing." McKeon now lives in New York.
Miss EmilyNuala O'ConnorSandstone Press
The enigmatic life of Emily Dickinson holds a deep fascination for writers and readers alike. Nuala O'Connor has anglicised her name from Ni Chonchuir for the American market and has taken on the challenge of reimagining the reclusive poet's life through her relationship with an 18-year-old Irish maid, Ada Concannon. Ada is from Dublin and her story is narrated in alternate chapters, providing a lyrical counterpoint to the period tone of Dickinson's voice. The two women find common ground through a love of nature and baking. As the poet hardly ever left her house in Amherst, it is the two female personalities that enrich the novel. Born in 1970, O'Connor has also published poetry, fiction and short stories, and lives in Galway.
The Green RoadAnne EnrightJonathan Cape
The Green Road is Enright's sixth novel. Born in 1962 in Dublin, she won both the Novel of the Year award and the Booker Prize for The Gathering. Enright is also our first Laureate of Irish Fiction. In The Green Road, she continues to probe the fault lines of family life. Deeply disenchanted characters vent their disappointment in a manner only Enright can channel.In a tale that spans 25 years, Dan Madigan returns to his childhood home in west Clare, travelling the eponymous Green Road which runs through the Burren with glimpses of the Atlantic ahead. There is beauty and darkness, hypocrisy and humility; it wouldn't be an Irish novel without them.
The Mark and The VoidPaul MurrayHamish Hamilton
The Mark and the Void is about the financial crisis and is Murray's third novel. Claude is a French investment banker based in Dublin. Murray's depiction of the city is one few of us would recognise or want to remember.The other characters are French, German, Greek, Russian and Australian, giving the book a sense of anywhere, except when Claude finds himself on an unexpected journey: "And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, exophthalmic … " The author of Skippy Dies has faced down the melodrama of our financial crisis and searched for meaning beyond.
BeatleboneKevin BarryCanongate
Intrigued by John Lennon's purchase in 1967 of Dorinish Island in Clew Bay, Kevin Barry explores how the story might have played out through the perspective of Lennon's fictitious driver, Cornelius O'Grady.It is 1978 and Lennon, aged 37, wants to retreat to the island, delve into his creative pool and do some primal screaming. A shaman is needed to negotiate the strange airs of the west coast, and O'Grady obliges.Car and boat journeys around Mulranny and Newport nurture the psychedelic mythology. Lennon's mythic quest through the doors of perception define this book, which was making waves before it went on sale.
The Little Red ChairsEdna O'BrienFaber & Faber
Edna O'Brien, the doyenne of Irish writing, published her 24th novel, The Little Red Chairs, this year. Evidently based on Radovan Karadzic ("the Butcher of Bosnia"), a dark stranger comes to the fictional town of Cloonoila.Dr Vladimir Dragan is ostensibly a healer and sex therapist from Montenegro. The local beauty, Fidelma, seeks help with fertility problems and falls in love with the mysterious Balkan.But Vlad is a Serbian war criminal and his unveiling has global significance together with horrific consequences for Fidelma. O'Brien confronts evil head on, and typically shines a spotlight on an Irish rural community that punishes a woman who has broken the tribal rules.The Sunday Times praised The Little Red Chairs as "a timely and defiant book".
To vote please visit www.irishbookawards.ie Voting ends the 19th at midnight. One vote per email address.
November 13, 2015
DUBLIN BOOK FESTIVAL PANEL
Tomorrow I am taking part in 'Writing Long & Short' at the Dublin Book Festival with Dermot Bolger, Aidan Mathews, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Donal Ryan. We're in conversation with Paula Shields.
When: Saturday 14 Nov, 3.30pm – 4.45pmWhere: Main Theatre, Smock Alley TheatreCost: €5/€3 Concession| BOOK NOWPaula Shields, senior researcher for RTE’s arts show The Works, discusses form, inspiration and the current work of some of Ireland’s most prestigious writers. Join Dermot Bolger, author of eleven critically acclaimed novels, most recently Tanglewood (New Island Books); Aidan Mathews, poet, playwright, novelist and author of new short story collection Charlie Chaplin’s Wishbone and Other Stories (The Lilliput Press); Nuala Ní Chonchúir, short story writer, poet and author of three novels including The Closet of Savage Mementos (New Island Books); award-winning novelist, short story writer and playwright Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, who received the 2015 Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature; and Donal Ryan, whose first collection of short stories, A Slanting of the Sun: Stories, will be published by The Lilliput Press and whose first two novels, The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December (The Lilliput Press), have won and been listed for numerous awards.
November 12, 2015
Ballinasloe library gets behind #BGEIBA nom.
My local library in Ballinasloe made this super supportive poster, which was very decent of them. The library has now moved into their stunning new home in the old church and convent on Society Street. More on that when the official launch happens.
November 10, 2015
IRISH INDO - BAKING & *MISS EMILY*
I have a feature in today's Irish Independent about me, Emily D and baking. I am grinning rather manically. The photographer was Andrew Downes, a super-nice fella from Galway. We had a laugh with the sieving etc. Click and zoom to read.
November 9, 2015
THE GLOSS & MISS EMILY
I love The Gloss , the very shiny, posh magazine that these days comes free with The Irish Times once a month. It's one of those aspirational magazines that features drool-worthy designer clothes and outrageously priced furniture and handbags (and the odd affordable item).
But they love books too. People like Antonia Hart, Mary O'Donnell and Polly Devlin are regular contributors and the magazine often has features on women's writing.
I have a feature in this month's edition about novel writing in general and Miss Emily, and the next novel, in particular. See pic below. Click and zoom :)
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