Submissions for 2025 Book Prize
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Catherine Airey - Confessions
It is late September in 2001 and the walls of New York are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. Her mother died long ago and now, orphaned on the cusp of adulthood, Cora is adrift and alone.
Soon, a letter will arrive with the offer of a new life: far out on the ragged edge of Ireland, in the town where her parents were young, an estranged aunt can provide a home and fulfil a long-forgotten promise. There the story of Cora's family is hidden, and in her presence will begin to unspool…
An essential, immersive debut from an astonishing new voice, Confessions traces the arc of three generations of women as they experience in their own time the irresistible gravity of the past: its love and tragedy, its mystery and redemption, and, in all things intended and accidental, the beauty and terrible shade of the things we do.
Catherine Airey grew up in England in a family of mixed Irish and English descent, and now lives in Bristol. Confessions is her first novel.
Naomi Cashman - The Crucifix
In 1865 orphaned Katherine is sent to the Convent of Mercy in Cobh, a place steeped in shadows and whispered terror. Strange events haunt its corridors – an organ playing through the night, fresh graves dug beneath her window, and girls vanishing after being summoned to the office of the sinister Sister Nora. Katherine soon realises the crucifix Sister Nora worships conceals a trail of murder, while the other nuns and orphans dare not intervene. Slowly, the crucifix awakens the darkness hidden deep within Katherine, entwining fascination, fear and ambition until she succumbs. She kills Sister Nora and claims the crucifix, ascending as the new Reverend Mother, the embodiment of the convent's evil. In the present day, during a tour of the renowned convent, a young boy discovers the crucifix and the cycle of terror begins anew, ensuring the malevolent legacy of the crucifix and the convent endures.
Naomi Cashman is an Irish writer, born in Cork, whose love of storytelling grew from the ghost tales and rain-soaked landscapes of the towns around her. She currently writes YA gothic horror that explores what people hide beneath the surface, blending atmospheric tension with an emotional core. Her debut novel, The Crucifix, was published in early September 2025 and she is now developing a new YA horror manuscript inspired by the vastness and isolation of the Australian outback. Drawing on her travels and life experiences, Naomi explores themes of hidden darkness, internal conflict and the uncanny across contrasting landscapes. When she isn’t writing, she spends her time travelling or reading, always seeking new ways to twist fears into something haunting and unforgettable.
Gethan Dick - Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night
Someone wakes you and it’s the end of the world. Someone lets you sleep and it’s the end of the world. Somebody comes in you and it’s the end of the world. Somebody comes out of you and it’s the end of the world. Every second, every millisecond, the world is ending.
Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night is a novel about mothering, wolves, bicycles, midwifery, post-apocalyptic feminism, gold, hunger and hearth. What’s worth knowing, learning and passing on, what’s worth living for and what sometimes cannot be explained. The fact is that the world ends all the time, the thing is what to do next. Gethan Dick’s debut is fizzing with energy, anger, fear, and, ultimately, hope.
Gethan Dick was born in 1980 in Belfast and grew up in Sligo. She moved to London for an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. She then studied at Camberwell College of Art and shifted her creative practice towards text-based and co-created visual art. She then moved to Marseille, France, where she has lived since 2011, working as one half of visual-arts duo gethan&myles with her partner, Myles Quinn.
Patrick Doherty - Pure Innocent Boy
Tadhg Kelly suffered a mental breakdown after his mother died. Now he is trying to find his way in a world where he no longer fits. He gets a job in the local toy shop and seems, on the surface, to be finding stability. But in truth he is drifting, and it is only a matter of time before he crashes again...
Interspersing Tadhg's diary entries with first-person accounts by his brother Damien and Damien's wife Eileen, Pure Innocent Boy is a poignant, aching character study about masculinity, mental health and grief that slowly builds in power, while also offering a state of the nation view of Ireland as seen from the bottom of society.
Patrick Doherty is the author of the novel, Pure Innocent Boy, published by Dedalus Books in 2025.
His short stories have appeared in the Irish Independent and have been broadcast on RTE Radio One. He has been nominated for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Awards and the PJ O’Connor Radio Drama Awards.
Born in Longford in 1987, he now lives in Seville, Spain, with his wife and two daughters.
Seán Farrell - Frogs For Watchdogs
After years of moving from place to place, a young family finds shelter in an isolated house in the Irish countryside. Their father is missing, Mum is a healer and B a formidable big sister. In his strange new territory, a wild little boy gives voice to his experience.
Jerry Drain, a local farmer, is stealing hay from the barn, someone is making nasty phone calls to the house at night and darkness is gathering at the edges of their lives. With his ferocious imagination the boy will do everything in his power to protect his family. But Jerry will not go away and Mum seems to be falling under his spell. It will be a year of major wins and baffling defeats for the boy, as Jerry’s true nature insists on revealing itself.
Dark, funny, tender and raw, Frogs for Watchdogs thrums with the intensity of childhood.
Seán Farrell was born and brought up in Ireland. After graduating from Cambridge University, he spent fifteen years in France. As well as writing, he also works as a freelance editor. He lives in Sligo with his wife, the writer Elske Rahill, and their four children. Frogs for Watchdogs is his first novel.
Elaine Garvey - The Wardrobe Department
Mairéad works all hours in a run-down West End theatre’s wardrobe department, her whole existence made up of threads and needles, running errands to mend shoes, fixing broken zips and handwashing underwear. She must also do her best to avoid groping hands backstage and the terrible bullying of the show’s producer.
But, despite her skill and growing experience, half of Mairéad remains in her windy, hedge-filled home in Ireland, and the life she abandoned there. In noughties London, she has the potential to be somebody completely new – why, then, does she feel so stuck? Between the bustling side streets of Soho, and the wet grass of Leitrim and Donegal, Mairéad is caught, running from the girl she was but unable to reveal the woman she’d hoped to become.
Told with rare honesty and equal measures of warmth and bite, The Wardrobe Department is a story about reckoning with the past, finding the courage to change the present – and asking what comes next.
Elaine Garvey is from Co. Sligo, Ireland. She completed an M.Phil. in Creative Writing in Trinity College, Dublin in 2000. Her short stories have been published in the Dublin Review and Winter Papers. She has worked as a programme co-ordinator at the Stinging Fly, was awarded an agility grant for her writing and has recently been selected as a participant on a basic income scheme for artists by the Irish Department of Arts. The Wardrobe Department is her first novel.
Claire Gleeson - Show Me Where It Hurts
How do you survive the unsurvivable?
Rachel lives with her husband Tom and their two children: it's the ordinary family life she always thought she'd have. All of that changes in an instant - when Tom runs the family car off the road, seeking to end his own life, and take his wife and children with him. Rachel is left to pore over the wreckage to try and understand what happened - to find a way to go on living afterwards.
What emerges is a snapshot of what it's like to live alongside someone who is suffering, how you keep yourself afloat when the person you love is drowning, and how you survive irreparable loss.
Impossible to turn away from, Show Me Where It Hurts is a compelling, heartbreaking and ultimately life-affirming story of recovery and unexpected hope.
Claire Gleeson is from Dublin, where she lives with her young family and works as a GP. Her short stories have been short- and long-listed for numerous prizes. In 2021 she was awarded a Words Ireland literary mentorship while she worked on the first draft of Show Me Where It Hurts, which went on to be a runner-up at the Irish Writers' Centre Novel Fair 2023.
Sharon Guard - Assembling Ailish
Ailish McCarthy is not doing well. Outwardly successful – career, beautiful home, wealthy husband, two daughters reared and on the cusp of their own lives – inwardly she is crumbling.
Her relationship with her mother was complicated and difficult, the grief following her death unnaturally prolonged. As much as she wants to move forward, Ailish is caught in a spiral with her ghosts. In order to escape them, she must resolve her past. Revisit it. Construct again, from memory, the family and friends who shaped her, the boy she could not forget, the changing Ireland which provided the backdrop for their lives.
Under the guidance of her therapist, Ailish begins the process of examining her previous selves: anxious child, traumatized teenager, adult woman riven with a never-to-be-shared secret. From these uniquely broken shards, can she assemble a present self, a whole self, one she can live with?
Sharon Guard has an MA in Creative writing from UL. Her work has appeared in New Irish Writing, SWERVE magazine, The Ogham Stone and the Washing Windows anthologies. She won the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award 2020 and has had short fiction and poetry listed for other competitions and publication
Louise Hegarty - Fair Play
Fair Play is the puzzle-box story of two competing tales that brilliantly lay bare the real truth of life - the terrifying mystery of grief.
The heart is a locked room.
Abigail’s brother Benjamin is dead, and her world has literally been split in two. In one reality Abigail finds herself back at work, navigating the frustrations of well-wishers and busybodies, desperately wondering why her brother has gone. In the other an eminent detective arrives determined to find Benjamin’s killer among his circle of close friends.
Is this a murder mystery or something more? What secrets do Benjamin’s friends hold? And can Abigail, immersed in her grief, find out the truth of her beloved brother’s life?
Louise Hegarty’s stories have appeared in Banshee, The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review and have been featured on BBC Radio 4. She was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize and recently her story ‘Now, Voyager’ was produced as part of A City and A Garden, a new state-of-the-art sonic experience commissioned by Sounds from a Safe Harbour in association with Body & Soul and presented as part of Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh. Fair Play is her debut novel.
Sean Hewitt - Open Heaven
On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. As he contends with the expectations of his family, his burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior.
Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, but underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own.
With the passing seasons, the two teenagers grow closer and the bond that emerges between them transforms their lives. James falls deeply for Luke, yet he is never sure of Luke’s true feelings. And as the end of summer nears, he has a choice to make – will he risk everything for the possibility of love?
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Patrick Holloway - The Language of Remembering
Returning from Brazil with his wife and daughter, Oisín is looking to rebuild a life in Ireland and reconnect with his mother, Brigid, who has early onset Alzheimer’s. As her condition deteriorates she starts to speak Irish, the language of her youth, and reflect on her childhood dreams and aspirations.
Mother and son embark on a journey of personal discovery, and as past traumas are exposed they begin to understand what has shaped them and who they really are.
‘The Language of Remembering’ asks how we connect to the people we love and how we move on from the past to find meaning in the present.
Patrick Holloway is an Irish writer of fiction and poetry and is an editor of the literary journal, The Four Faced Liar. He completed his Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow, before moving to Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he completed his PhD in Creative Writing.
He is the winner of the Bath Short Story Award, The Molly Keane Creative Writing Prize, The Flash 500 Prize, the Allingham Fiction contest and he was the recipient of the Paul McVeigh Residency in 2023. His work appears in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland, The Moth, Southword, The Ilanot Review, Carve, The Irish Times and The Irish Independent.
Patrick Kealey - Bogboy
Alfie O’Brien, aka Bogboy, is born an orphan into a house of dead things, presided over by his imperious, ailing aunt. Here, the past won’t let the present go; ghosts confer with the living; and discovering who you are means coming face to face with uncomfortable truths. It is a house cursed by shadows, secrets and dynasty.
Old enmities bite down, and when Bogboy is left for dead, he must learn how to trust love, discover where he belongs, and reconcile himself with his destiny. The ancestors are gathering and Bogboy is about to become a man.
An audacious, rousing story of hope and beauty rising out of the dying embers of a corrupt and redundant regime, Bogboy is a story for our times, reminding us that attention to the natural world offers solace and healing, and that love – wherever we may find it – is always stronger than hatred.
Patrick Kealey knew he wanted to be a storyteller from the age of six, when he discovered that a rich interior life was a lot more fun than everyday life.
He studied English Literature at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and has worked as an actor and theatre director, producer, drama lecturer, workshop leader and playwright. His theatre work has taken him to America, France, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Colombia, as well as theatres and festivals throughout the UK and Ireland. He performs two solo shows, including the award-winning adaptation of The Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel.
Patrick also worked as a tour guide all around Ireland for over twenty years and, somewhere along those winding Irish roads, Bogboy was born.
Rose Keating - Oddbody
Oddbody is a collection of ten bold and unsettling short stories that confront themes of desire, fear and shame, each one asking how far the bounds of the human form can be pushed, stretched – and subverted. A woman finds herself navigating a co-dependent relationship with a ghost. A waitress gives birth to an egg during her breakfast shift. A doctor puts his patient on a cleanse to ‘purify’ her mind, body and soul.
Through playful but provocative prose, Rose Keating traverses a realm both dreamlike and nightmarish, exposing – to the bone – the absurdities and horrors of the feminine experience. Oddbody prods a finger at societal norms, gleefully turns familiar tropes on their head and announces Keating as an audacious new voice in Irish fiction.
Rose Keating is a writer from Waterford, Ireland. She studied on the Creative Writing Prose Fiction MA at UEA, where she was a recipient of the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize. She is a winner of the Marian Keyes Young Writer Award, the Hot Press Write Here, Write Now prize and the Ted and Mary O’Regan Arts Bursary. She has been published in the Stinging Fly, Apex Magazine, Banshee and Southword. In 2022, she received an Agility Award from the Irish Arts Council.
Claire-Lise Kieffer - Tenterhooks
An eerie discovery at a building site triggers a crisis for a garda and his family. A grieving woman comes to believe that she is being possessed by the spirit of her mother, and seeks an unusual exorcism. A brave new world is established as Galway City disappears slowly underwater. And a young woman experiences the morning after the night before in a strange, condemned midlands town.
In these stories of an Ireland both strange and achingly familiar, Claire-Lise Kieffer animates our collective past, present and future. Humorous, off-kilter, savage and surreal, she depicts the bonds that hold couples, families and communities together with a sharp, humane and deeply original slant.
Claire-Lise Kieffer is Franco-German and lives in Galway. She is a graduate of the MA in Writing from the University of Galway, where she studied under Mike McCormack. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the literary journals Banshee, Profiles, Crossways and The Honest Ulsterman, among others. Her debut short story collection, Tenterhooks, was described in The Irish Times as ‘strikingly original … unique, intriguing and often darkly funny.’ She works as a Communications and Marketing Manager for Notre Dame Global, based in Kylemore Abbey. She was a recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award in 2022 and 2024 and is currently working on a novel.
Róisín Lanigan - I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There
Brilliantly observed, I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There is a ghost story rooted in the everyday realities of renting, relationships and belonging. Áine has just moved into a new flat with her boyfriend in an affluent neighbourhood, a place that promises stability and comfort, yet quickly begins to feel unsettling. As small discomforts accumulate – physical, emotional and social – the flat itself becomes a site of unease, mirroring fractures in Áine’s relationship and sense of self. The novel traces how space shapes emotional life, capturing the quiet dread of not quite feeling at home, and the creeping realisation that something is fundamentally wrong. Clear-eyed and sharply funny, it examines loneliness, loss and belonging.
Róisín Lanigan is an editor and writer based in London and Belfast. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian and The Fence, amongst other publications, where she has written on culture, politics, and everyday life with a sharp, observational eye. Lanigan is known for her clear, precise prose and interest in how power, space and social structures shape contemporary life. She was longlisted for the Curtis Brown First Novel Prize in 2019, and won the Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award in 2020. I Want to Go Home But I'm Already There is her first novel. She continues to work as an editor while developing new projects.
Sylvia Leatham - Chaos Theory
Maeve McGettigan has just landed a job as Dublin's least prepared robot babysitter. One minute she’s coasting through her boring marketing job; the next, she’s responsible for Kobi – a well-meaning robot assistant with zero filter and a knack for publicly humiliating her. For Kobi, he just wants to connect with his human colleagues – whether they like it or not.
As chaos erupts around her, Maeve finds herself unexpectedly caught between two very different men: Shane – her on-again, off-again messy situationship – and Josh, Kobi's handsome creator, who makes her question everything she thought she wanted for her life.
But then Maeve and Kobi’s story takes a shocking twist, and it’s suddenly time for her to decide what – and who – she’s really fighting for.
Sylvia Leatham is a writer from Dublin, Ireland.
Her books seek out the human heart behind global issues or technological change, finding comedy in the everyday and romance in unusual places. While she has a passion for science, human relationships are what really fascinate her.
Chaos Theory, her debut novel, was the first in a two-book deal with Storm Publishing, brokered by Laura Bennett of the Liverpool Literary Agency.
Prior to publication, Chaos Theory was shortlisted for The Letter Review manuscript prize in the US, and for the Watson Little x Indie Novella novel prize in the UK. The first chapter was shortlisted for the Retreat West First Chapter competition. The book was also longlisted for the Mslexia novel prize and for the Novel London Literary prize.
Brendan Mac Evilly - Deep Burn
‘The curator wants to know if there’s a limit to what she will burn? Will she really burn anything?’ ‘Of course,’ Vinny replied, ‘anything you like.’
In a small seaside village in South Kerry, Martha Knox, an artist, has developed an unlikely career burning emotionally charged objects and photographing the results. Her clients, including writers and collectors, travel from far and wide with things they need her to destroy. But her new relationships with these individuals become increasingly complicated with the arrival of curator Kingsley Masozi-Kohler, who is considering her work for his renowned Berlin Biennale.
This surreal story explores themes of fame, love, contemporary art, and professional envy, as the photographer navigates her evolving role in the art world.
Brendan Mac Evilly is a talented writer and the author of the books Deep Burn (Marrowbone Books, 2025) and At Swim: A Book About the Sea (Collins Press, 2016). His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Winter Papers, the Stinging Fly, Channel, the Honest Ulsterman, the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Sunday Times, among other outlets. He is the director/editor of Holy Show, an annual arts journal and production company, and the current Emerging Curator in Development at Kilkenny Arts Office.
Caragh Maxwell - Sugartown
Leaving home wasn't supposed to be temporary for Saoirse Maher. When she moved to London, Saoirse was leaving Ireland behind for good, and with it her messy, broken family. But it turns out that starting again isn't as easy as she imagined, and when her five-year relationship goes south, Saoirse finds herself out of options. And so here she is, trudging backwards, not forwards, to her mother Máire's house up a side road on the outskirts of Irish civilisation.
Except the world she comes back to is nothing like the one she left behind. Her mother has a new family, and everyone else seems to be moving on. But between the drinking, drugs, falling back in with her childhood best friend Doireann, and an entirely healthy, not-problematic-at-all-thanks relationship with Charlie, there's plenty to distract her.
Don't look too closely, and everything's fine. Saoirse is just fine.
Caragh Maxwell is a writer living in Sligo town. She graduated from the Trinity College MPhil in Creative Writing in 2023, and her essays, poems and stories have been published in The Irish Times, The Cormorant and other publications. In 2019, she wrote one of the most highly read pieces in the Irish Times that year: "I hoped to God that I’d just die in the night and get it over with". Her writing focuses on the self, memory, and womanhood. Sugartown is her debut novel.
Liadan Ní Chuinn - Every One Still Here
A young girl spends her days on a double-decker bus. A bride-to-be prays to St Valentine's bones. Flowers are found, left in bouquets, all over a museum. Teenagers gather to dissect the human body.
Teeming with compassion and thrumming with energy, the stories in Every One Still Here are scrupulous in their attention to detail, epic in their scope. In this bravura first collection, Liadan Ní Chuinn delivers a consummate blend of the personal and the political.
Liadan Ní Chuinn was born in the north of Ireland in 1998. Their stories and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, Tolka and Granta. Every One Still Here is their first book.
June O’Sullivan - The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife
Ireland,1867. Eliza Carthy moves with her lighthouse-keeper husband, James, and sons, to the island of Skellig Michael. Eliza is proud of her husband’s promotion to Principal Keeper and is eager to support him in every way. But life in this location is challenging.
The island is 54 acres of jagged rock, jutting out of the Atlantic, with no way of communicating from or leaving the island. With no access to a boat, keepers rely on a tender boat to deliver news, supplies. The island is exposed to extreme changes of weather and the landscape is fraught with danger.
When assistant keeper Edmund and his wife Ruth arrive, Eliza hopes for respite. But her neighbors are not what she’d expected. They blow hot and cold, seemingly wanting Eliza and her family to leave Skellig Michael, and making her question her sanity.
June O’Sullivan is an Irish author. Originally from Limerick, she now lives on an island off County Kerry with her husband and their three children. She writes historical fiction, flash fiction and short stories, and is doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. This is her debut novel, and she is currently working on her second novel based on the life of a forgotten Irish aviatrix.
Gráinne O'Hare - Thirst Trap
In a crumbling Belfast houseshare, three women are living for the weekend, their wild friendship the core of their lives.
Maggie: navigating the twin perils of therapy and a situationship with an unavailable woman.
Harley: careening from club to club, hookup to hookup, in a blurry quest for meaning.
Róise: about to turn thirty, her crush on her boss the only reason she still turns up to work.
But the three of them used to be four. And now, one year on from a tragic accident, Maggie, Róise and Harley still can’t face up to any of it: to the death of their best friend, adulthood, the future, and to each other.
Gráinne O’Hare is a writer from Belfast based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She received a Northern Debut Award for Fiction from New Writing North in 2022. She has been shortlisted for the Francis MacManus Short Story Competition, the Bridport Prize, the London Magazine Short Story Prize and the Benedict Kiely Short Story Competition. She is Media Sub-Editor of Criticks reviews for the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, and is currently completing a PhD on eighteenth-century women’s life-writing at Newcastle University. Thirst Trap is her first novel.
Aisling Rawle - The Compound
You wake up in a compound in the middle of the desert, along with nine other women.
All of you are young, all beautiful, all keen to escape the grinding poverty, political unrest and environmental catastrophe of the outside world.
You realise that cameras are tracking your every move, broadcasting to millions of reality TV fans.
Soon, ten men will arrive on foot – if they all survive the journey.
What will you have to do to win?
And what happens to the losers?
The Compound is an addictive literary satire on modern excess: it holds a twisted mirror up to our obsession with winning, losing and, above all, watching.
Aisling Rawle is an ex-bookseller from Leitrim in the West of Ireland, where she wrote The Compound, her dark reality TV satire and debut novel. Aisling currently lives in Dublin.
Rosamund Taylor - Filly
From acclaimed poet Rosamund Taylor comes a compelling, genre-bending coming of age story. In the hostile world of Ireland’s secondary school system, Orla is discovering her burgeoning sexuality. When her friend Muireann rejects her advances, Orla turns to her online community for support, and to her charismatic English teacher Irene Wall for a love affair both passionate and annihilating.
A novel in verse about sexual awakening, masochistic love, and the transformative possibilities of community, Filly introduces two unforgettable characters in Orla and the complicated and magnetic Irene Wall. Written with Taylor’s trademark earthy lyricism, Filly is an exploration of intergenerational love and trauma, and an explosion of queer joy.
Rosamund Taylor is the winner of the Rialto Poetry Prize 2025, the Telegraph Poetry Prize 2023, The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2020 and the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry 2017. In 2023, her debut collection, In Her Jaws (Banshee Press 2022), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection and the Yeats Society Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. Her essays have recently appeared in The Irish Times and The Stinging Fly, and her poems have featured in Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Mslexia, Poetry Ireland Review and on BBC Radio 4 and RTE Radio 1.
Shane Tivenan - To Avenge a Dead Glacier
This debut collection simmers with style, verve, tension and humor. Throughout the stories in To Avenge a Dead Glacier, Tivenan explores the lives of Irish outsiders. His characters are artists, sean-nós singers, members of the queer community, the gifted, the neurodivergent, the environmentally concerned, people with memory problems, the spiritual people, the non-human.
A man attends the funeral of a glacier in Iceland without fully knowing why he is there. In another, a midlands graffiti artist warns his townspeople through his throw-ups about the dangers of the way they are living, but neglects his own mind in the process. A ninety-two-year-old woman who suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome tries to celebrate her birthday in a nursing home in Roscommon while fighting back the hallucinations brought on by her condition. A semi-retired plasterer is haunted by the silencing of the birds in his townland, a silencing which he knows he took part in.
These are stories rich in the essential detail of human life, in the fraught exchanges that make up our every relationship, and very often of life lived beyond the confines of safety or simplicity.
Shane Tivenan grew up close to Athlone Town, County Roscommon. He studied Cultural Anthropology at Maynooth University. His fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. He was awarded the 2020 RTÉ Francis MacManus Prize, the 2024 John McGahern Award, and was selected for the Bridport Prize Anthology in 2023.