Section:GDN 1J PaGe:5 Edition Date:190730 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 29/7/2019 18:22 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Tuesday 30 July 2019 The Guardian •
5
Irish literature
thrives because
it takes risks
dominated by the Irish: Kevin Barry , winner of the
award in 2012 and just longlisted for this year’s Booker ;
Danielle McLaughlin from the Republic and Louise
Kennedy from Northern Ireland.
The notion of “new” voices though, while much
beloved of publishers , does not tell the whole truth.
McCormack, for instance, whose 2016 novel, Solar
Bones , won both the Goldsmiths Prize , which celebrates
innovation in the form, and the Dublin International
Literary Award , is in his 50s. The novel, a ghost story
written in a single sentence, is his fi fth book and
struggled to fi nd a home until it landed on the desks of
the fearless independent publishers Tramp. “I couldn’t
give my work away, to be honest with you,” McCormack
told the Guardian in 2017. “No one wanted to know.”
Anna Burns , now 57, whose dystopi an exploration of
the Troubles, Milkman, won last year’s Booker, famously
declared she would have to inform social services that
she was no longer in need of benefi ts. Similarly, it took
McBride nine years to fi nd a publisher for the multi-
award winning A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing – and once
again, it was a tiny publisher, Galley Beggar Press , based
in Norwich , which took the gamble.
How is this happening? Some credit the fi nancial
crash and its particularly harsh impact on an Ireland still
bedazzled by the notion of a Celtic Tiger for the creative
explosion – although many writers of the previous
generation or two might disagree with such a one-note
explanation. And despite changes in setting and subject
matter, there is a continuity between writers such as
Sebastian Barry , Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín and
those who have come to prominence more recently.
But the crash perhaps aligned particularly well with
one of the recurrent preoccupations of Irish writers : the
way that fracture – social, economic, personal – can be
built into the language we use. When I moved to Ireland
just over a year ago, I wrote of glorying in hearing peopletalk , and was ticked off online for painting the Irish
as charming country-dwellers who greeted me with
a “Top of the morning” every day. But it wasn’t that,
honestly. It was more that day-to-day conversation
seemed to be more vivid and unexpected than I was
used to. An electrician arrived in the middle of a kitchen
renovation and inspected the chaos. “You are all
asunder,” he said to me, gravely.
Irish writing has never shied away from
experimentalism, and nor have readers been frightened
off by it. There is a far more relaxed approach to genre,
a less divisive bracketing of “posh” and commercial
writers, and less policing of the boundaries between
fi ction, nonfi ction and other art forms. By way of
example, at the weekend I’ll be chairing a discussion
between the writer Sinéad Gleeson, author of the
exceptional essay collection Constellations , and the
musician Lisa Hannigan.
It’s easy to have rose-tinted spectacles when you’re
essentially still a tourist somewhere. (“You’ll always
be a blow-in,” as someone told me the other night, in
a far kindlier tone than the statement suggests.) The
slow opening up of “literature” to writers of colour and
to those of diff erent class backgrounds is happening in
Great Britain too: see, for example, a novel such as Guy
Gunaratne ’s polyphonous In Our Mad and Furious City ,
or the crowd funded anthology of working-class writers,
Common People, edited by Kit de Waal.
But Pollyanna or not, there is something joyous and
life-affi rming in the Irish writing scene, whether it
comes courtesy of a complete newcomer or not, as I’m
about to discover from a proof of the new novel by the
88-year-old Edna O’Brien , not only still writing, but
still exploring. Girl tells the story of a child captured by
Boko Haram ; as far away, one might think, from those
country girls she wrote about in 1960. Will it take risks?
Hard to imagine her doing it any other way.Alex
Clark
M
uch has been written about
the boom in Irish writing,
buoyed by the apparently
ceaseless tide of new voices:
not a smattering of talent
making a splash but waves
and waves of writers, going
beyond much repeated names
such as Sally Rooney and Eimear McBride to the
equally talented and ambitious Mike McCormack ,
Sara Baume , Colin Barrett , Anakana Schofi eld , Gavin
Corbett and Lisa McInerney.
Now there’s more. Having been an all-American
aff air in 2018, this year the shortlist for the Sunday
Times Audible Short Story Award (the world’s richest
short story prize – £30,000 for a single story! ) isРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS