Submissions for 2021 Book Prize

The secrets people kept, the lies they told. In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories, people are effortlessly cruel to one another, and the natural world is a primitive salve. Here, women are domestically trapped by predatorial men, Ireland's folklore and politics loom large, and poverty - material, emotional, sexual - seeps through every crack. A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a ghost estate, with blood on her hands; a young woman is tormented by visions of the man murdered by her brother during the Troubles; a pregnant mother fears the worst as her husband grows illegal cannabis with the help of a vulnerable teenage girl; a woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Announcing a major new voice in literary fiction for the twenty-first century, these sharp shocks of stories offer flashes of beauty, and even humour, amidst the harshest of truths.

Louise Kennedy grew up in Holywood, Co. Down. Her short stories have appeared in journals including The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, Banshee, Wasifiria ndAmbit and she has written for the Guardian, Irish Times, BBC Radio 4 and RTE Radio 1. Her work has won prizes and she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in both 2019 and 2020. Before starting her writing career, she spent nearly thirty years working as a chef. She lives in Sligo with her husband and two children.

1900s London: For Patrick Bowley, fresh from rural Galway, a place of mind-expanding encounters with mystics, suffragettes, theosophists and free-thinkers. Drawn into the world of such luminaries as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Annie Besant and W B Yeats, it seems that Patrick is on a quest for meaning that will bear fruit. But a bruising failure in romance leaves him disillusioned with London and its class divisions and, in spiritual crisis, he flees to the familiarity of rural Ireland. But Patrick finds no peace and as Europe slides towards war and Ireland towards rebellion, his longing to shut out the world is challenged by a vocation to preach peace in Ireland that will not be quieted. And so he begins an epic pilgrimage to Dublin, arriving days before the 1916 Easter Rising. It is here that Patrick's journey reaches a gripping climax - one that finally reveals the true nature of the 'pathless country'. Winner of the J G Farrell Award and an Irish Writers' Centre Novel Fair Award, James Harpur's debut novel deftly weaves a story of spiritual awakening with fin de siecle alternative thought, love and political history, exploring how conscience and spiritual quest survive in an atmosphere of war, sectarianism and class hierarchy.

James Harpur has published several poetry collections with Anvil Press and Carcanet and is a mem-ber of Aosdána, the Irish academy of arts. He has won a number of awards for his poetry, includingthe UK National Poetry Competition, the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize, and a Patrick and Kather-ine Kavanagh Fellowship. His books include The Oratory of Light (2021), poems inspired by Iona and St Columba; The Examined Life (2021), winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize; The White Silhouette (2018) an Irish Times Book of the Year; and Angels and Harvesters, a PBS Recommenda-tion. James regularly broadcasts his work on radio and gives readings and talks about writing, inspi-ration and the imagination at literary festivals and in schools and universities. The Pathless Country is his debut novel.

A young woman comes of age in the shadow of her family's tragic past

When Beth Crowe starts university, she is shadowed by the ghost of her potential as a competitive swimmer. Free to create a fresh identity for herself, she finds herself among people who adore the poetry of her grandfather, Benjamin Crowe, who died tragically before she was born. She embarks on a secret relationship - and on a quest to discover the truth about Benjamin and his widow, her beloved grandmother Lydia. The quest brings her into an archive that no scholar has ever seen, and to a person who knows things about her family that nobody else knows.

Holding Her Breath is a razor-sharp, moving and seriously entertaining novel about complicated love stories, ambition and grief - and a young woman coming fully into her powers.

Eimear Ryan's writing has appeared in Granta, Winter Papers, The Dublin Review and The Stinging Fly. She is the 2021 Writer in Residence at University College Cork. She is a co-founder of the literary journal Banshee and its publishing imprint, Banshee Press. She was shortlisted for the Newcomer of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards for her first novel, Holding Her Breath. A native of Co. Tipperary, Eimear now lives in Cork city.

With fierce imagination, a woman revisits the moments that shape her life; from crushes on teachers to navigating relationships in a fast-paced world; from overhearing her grandmothers' peculiar stories to nurturing her own personal freedom and a boundless love of literature. 

Fusing fantasy with lived experience, Checkout 19 is a vivid and mesmerising journey through the small traumas and triumphs that define us - as readers, as writers, as human beings. 

Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Claire-Louise's fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications including White Review, Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper's Magazine, Vogue Italia, Music & Literature, and New York Times Magazine.

Willard, his mother and his girlfriend Nyla have spent their entire lives in an endless journey where daily survival is dictated by the ultimate imperative: obey the rules, or you will lose your place in the Line. Everything changes the day Willard s mother dies and he finds an incomprehensible book hidden among her few belongings... 

Niall Bourke is a writer and a teacher. Niall graduated from his art-time in Goldsmiths University’s Teacher/Writer MA with distinction in 2015, and set himself the goal of having a poetry collection, a short story collection and a novel published within the next five years.

Since then Niall’s work has been published widely in magazines and journals in Ireland and the UK, and his poems and stories have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Costa Short Story Award and the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award. Line, his debut novel, was released in April 2021 with Ireland-based publisher Tramp Press. He lives in South London with his partner, his daughter, his son and his cat.

Aoife knows everyone in Dundalk's underworld. Too well, in some cases. But when she meets Annie, a beautiful whirlwind of a woman, and brings her to the Town, she finds that she doesn't know nearly enough about her.

Annie is magnetic and wild and Aoife's desire to learn more quickly becomes a need, and then an obsession - to know this dangerous woman, to love her, to keep her. So when Aoife's friend and collaborator the Rat King asks her to help him dispose of ten kilos of cocaine, swiped from a rival, she brings Annie along for a road trip through a Britain that she only knows as a place to be suspicious of. So when Annie decides she doesn't want to return to Ireland, Aoife makes a decision that changes everything.

Gritty and yet tender, tragic and yet hopeful, Iron Annie is a breakneck journey that crackles with energy, warmth and heart, and marks the arrival of a fresh and vibrant new voice in literary fiction. 

Luke Cassidy is a writer from Dundalk, Ireland. He has adapted his novel, Iron Annie, for the stage as the Iron Annie Literary Cabaret, a spectacle of spoken word and music based on the book, which will tour twenty theatres in Ireland with the support of the Irish Arts Council. A short story of his, A Good Turn, will be featured in the forthcoming New Island Books anthology of writing from the Irish border region, The New Frontier. Iron Annie is his first novel.

Liverpool 1981. As the city burns during inner city riots, Paul meets two people who will change his life: Nadezhda, an elusive poet who has fallen out of fashion; and her daughter Sarah, with whom he shares an instant connection.

As the summer reaches its climax his feelings for both are tested amidst secrets, lies and the unravelling of Nadezhda's past. It is an experience that will define the rest of his life.

The Outsiders moves from early-80s Liverpool, via Nadezhda's clandestine background in war-torn Europe, through to the present day, taking in the global and local events that shape all three characters. In a powerful story of hidden histories, lost loves and painful truths ambitiously told against the backdrop of Liverpool's fall and rise, James Corbett's enthralling debut novel explores the complexities of human history and how individual perspectives of the past shape everyone's present.

James Corbett is an author and journalist who has reported from all over the world for the BBC, Guardian, Observer, Independent and numerous other publications. 

His non-fiction books include his collaboration with the legendary goalkeeper Neville Southall, The Binman Chronicles, which was named by TalkSport as one of the ten best sports books of all time, and Faith of our Families, longlisted in the 2018 British Sports Book of the Year awards. ‍ 

The Outsiders is his first novel. A tale of lost loves and painful truths told against the backdrop of Liverpool’s fall and rise, it is on the longlist for the Portico Prize 2022. Born in Liverpool, a city with which he retains close connections, he emigrated to Ireland in 2012. He now lives in rural Co Laois with his Irish wife and three children, just a short distance from his ancestral home in Tipperary.  

Iosac Mulgannon is a man called to stand. Losing a grip on his mental and physical health, he is burdened with looking after a mute child whom the local villagers view as cursed. The aging farmer stubbornly refuses to succumb in the face of adversity and will do anything, at any cost, to keep hold of his farm and the child. This dark and lyrical debut novel confronts a claustrophobic rural community caught up in the uncertainties of a rapidly changing world. 

Ryan Dennis is a former Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing and has taught creative writing at several universities. He has been published in various literary journals, particularly in the US, including The Cimarron Review, The Threepenny Review and Fusion. In addition to completing a PhD in creative writing at the National University of Ireland, Galway, he is a syndicated columnist for agricultural journals around the world. The Beasts They Turned Away is Ryan’s debut novel. 

Derry. Summer 2016. Aidan and Iona, now eighteen, were both born on the day of the Northern Ireland peace deal.

Aidan is Catholic, Irish, and Republican. With his ex-political prisoner father gone and his mother dead, Aidan's hope is pinned on exam results earning him a one-way ticket out of Derry. To anywhere.

Iona, Protestant and British, has a brother and father in the police. She's got university ambitions, a strong faith and a fervent belief that boys without one track minds are a myth.

At a post-exam party, Aidan wanders alone across the Peace Bridge and becomes the victim of a brutal sectarian attack. Iona witnessed the attack; picked up Aidan's phone and filmed what happened, and gets in touch with him to return the phone. When the two meet, alone and on neutral territory, the differences between them seem insurmountable.

Both their fathers held guns, but safer to keep that secret for now.

Despite their differences and the secrets they have to keep from each other, there is mutual intrigue, and their friendship grows. And so what? It's not the Troubles. But for both Iona and Aidan it seems like everything is keeping them apart , when all they want is to be together...

Sue Divin is a Derry based writer but, hailing originally from Armagh, can’t quite classify herself a ‘Derry Girl.’ With a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies and a career in Community Relations in Northern Ireland, her writing often touches on diversity, reconciliation and the legacy of the Troubles today. Her début novel, Guard Your Heart (Macmillan 2021), has been described as ‘Profoundly powerful, subtle and effective’ (The Guardian), ‘Outstanding’ (Irish Examiner), ‘A deeply affecting, powerful book’ (Irish Independent) and ‘Compelling’ (Irish Times). It was joint winner of the Irish Novel Fair 2019. Her short stories and flash fiction have been published in The Caterpillar, The Cormorant, The Honest Ulsterman, The Bangor Literary Journal and Splonk. Her second novel, Truth Be Told, will be published in April 2022. Sue writes because fiction is a powerful tool for creating empathy, and empathy is a powerful tool for creating peace. 

Cahir and Dan grew up on Inishowen, in north Donegal. It is their last year at home together. When his brother leaves, Cahir will be left behind, but he has plans too.
Cahir plants trees outside the town, on a scrap of ground belonging to their mother. In a world full of badness, he wants to do something good. It is a secret, even from Dan.
Dan works full time at the supermarket, content where he is. He has taken a year out before university and is messaging Lydia. If it works out with her, he might stay longer.
But the land doesn't belong to Cahir or to Dan. It has been sold to Lydia's brother and when Lydia finds Cahir tending the trees, on ground that isn't his, things spiral out of Cahir's control, threatening everything he has worked for. 

Kevin Doherty lives in Co. Donegal, Ireland. He grew up on the Inishowen Peninsula, where Penny Baps is set, and now runs a shop there with his brother. Before that he studied Medicine in Belfast. Penny Baps is his first novel and is about the relationship between two brothers. It was one of three novels published by JM Originals, an imprint of John Murray Publishers, in 2021. On publication, the Irish Times said that ‘Doherty brings a new, Indeed original voice to the Irish fiction able’ while the Irish Examiner said that Cahir is ‘ ‘a funny quirky character [who] will win readers’ hearts’.

all things must pass is the story of Martin Wilson – a disturbed youth with a penchant for knives, Bruce Lee, and samurai films. Martin scours the streets of Chelsea for victims and lives in a fantasy world which he filters through his hyperactive imagination. At one moment Martin is Zorro, leaving his mark as a warning to his enemies; in the next, he has transformed into a rhinoceros charging at the plate glass window of an antique shop. But beneath the hard surface of this wild young man, there is a quieter and more thoughtful person struggling to be heard. When Martin is moved from a safe house in London to an institution in the countryside, he finds himself at odds with his new surroundings. He has a lot of growing up to do and life is lurking in the wings to trip him up and teach him some hard lessons. Martin does return to London eventually and it is here that Cupid’s arrow pierces his armour, turning his world upside down. The transformation wrought in his heart and soul sets him on the road to acceptance and maturity.

Stephen Don is an award-winning screenwriter from Co. Down. Before becoming a writer, Stephen travelled widely and lived abroad for a number of years. He has been an actor, a teacher, an office dogsbody, a gravedigger, a barman, and a nursing assistant. All things must pass is Stephen’s first novel. 

Sinead Hynes is a tough, driven, funny young property developer with a terrifying secret.

No-one knows it: not her fellow patients in a failing hospital, and certainly not her family. She has confided only in Google and a shiny magpie.

But she can't go on like this, tirelessly trying to outstrip her past and in mortal fear of her future. Across the ward, Margaret Rose is running her chaotic family from her rose-gold Nokia. In the neighbouring bed, Jane, rarely but piercingly lucid, is searching for a decent bra and for someone to listen. Sinead needs them both.

As You Were is about intimate histories, institutional failures, the kindness of strangers, and the darkly present past of modern Ireland. It is about women's stories and women's struggles. It is about seizing the moment to be free.

Wildly funny, desperately tragic, inventive and irrepressible, As You Were introduces a brilliant voice in Irish fiction with a book that is absolutely of our times.

Elaine Feeney has published three collections of poetry, Where’s Katie?, The Radio was Gospel, Rise, and a drama piece, WRoNGHEADED, commissioned by the Liz Roche Company. She teaches at The National University of Ireland, Galway. Her work has been widely published and anthologised in Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, the Irish Times, Copper Nickel, Stonecutter Journal and others. As You Were, her fiction debut, won the Kate O’Brien Award 2021 and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2021, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 2020 and the Dalkey Literary Awards Emerging Writer of the Year in 2021. 

Kate has taught herself to be careful, to be meticulous. To mark the anniversary of a death in the family, she plans a dinner party - from the fancy table settings to the perfect Baked Alaska waiting in the freezer.

Yet by the end of the night, old tensions have flared, the guests have fled, and Kate is spinning out of control. But all we have is ourselves, her father once said, all we have is family.

Set between the 1990s and the present day, from a farmhouse in Carlow to Trinity College, Dublin, Dinner Party is a dark, sharply observed debut that thrillingly unravels into family secrets and tragedy. As the past catches up with the present, Kate learns why, despite everything, we can't help returning home.

Sarah Gilmartin is a critic who reviews fiction for the Irish Times. She is co-editor of the anthology Stinging Fly  Stories and has an MFA from University College Dublin. She won Best Playwright  at the inaugural Short+Sweet Dublin  festival. Her short stories have been  published in The Dublin Review, New  Irish Writing and shortlisted for the RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story Award. Her story ‘The Wife’ won the 2020 Máirtín Crawford Award at Belfast Book Festival.

This debut novel follows Marcella Coyle, fourteen years old, from Ireland to Alabama in 1904 to make a new life there with her brother. Jimmy is an outspoken priest in a fast-growing city, simmering with racism and inequality. Marcella wants to get an education and go home. War and the revival of the KKK turn their stories in a very different direction. 

Sheila Killian was born in Roscommon, in the dead centre of Ireland, and now lives outside Limerick City, where she teaches at University. Her fiction, poetry and travel writing have won awards in Ireland and the UK, and her work has been broadcast on RTE Radio. She is a member of Writepace, and spends as much time as she can by the sea. Something Bigger is inspired by the life of her grandaunt, Marcella, who left for the States at the age of fourteen and by the time they met, had become a real-life Alabama belle, with creamy blue eyes and a slow, Southern drawl. Marcella taught Sheila to read using the tales of Brer Rabbit, and filled her full of stories of the South, and the unforgettable drama that unfolded there and now lies within the pages of this debut novel.

Mother Mother is a powerful coming-of-age novel and an intimate family study. It's about finding light in dark places, and it examines the cost of unconditional love.

Mary McConnell grew up longing for information about the mother she never knew, who died suddenly when Mary was only a baby. Her brother Sean was barely old enough to remember, and their father numbed his pain with drink.

Now aged thirty-five, Mary has lived in the same house her whole life. She's never left Belfast. She has a son, TJ, who's about to turn eighteen, and is itching to see more of the world.

One Saturday morning, TJ wakes up to find his mother gone. He doesn't know where - or why - but he's the only one who can help find her.

Mother Mother takes us down the challenging road of Mary's life, while following TJ's increasingly desperate search for his mother, as he begins to understand what has led her to this point.

This is a gritty, affecting novel about family, grief, addiction, and motherhood. And it asks the question - if you spend your life giving everything to the ones you love; do you risk losing yourself along the way?

 Annie Macmanus is an internationally renowned DJ, broadcaster, events curator and author. She spent seventeen years at BBC Radio 1 where she presented a daily music show and continues to DJ on the main stages of music festivals around the world. She also produces her own podcast, Changes with Annie Macmanus, where she speaks to writers (including Zadie Smith, Sinéad Gleeson and Bernardine Evaristo), artists and fascinating people from all walks of life about important changes they’ve faced.

Annie was born in Dublin, and after attending Wesley College in the city she went on to study English Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. She now lives in London. Mother Mother, her first book, was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller.

My mother made a snap decision. How could we know it would change us forever?

That's the feeling engulfing the car as Ellen's mother swerves over to the hard-shoulder and orders her daughter out onto the roadside. Ignoring the protests of her other children, she accelerates away, leaving Ellen standing on the gravel verge in her school pinafore and knee socks as the light fades.

What would you do as you watch your little sister getting smaller in the rear view window? How far would you be willing to go to help her? The Gallagher children are going to find out. This moment is the beginning of a summer that will change everything. 

Una Mannion was born in Philadelphia and lives in County Sligo Ireland. She has won numerous prizes for her work including the Hennessy Emerging Poetry Award and the Doolin, Cúirt, Allingham and Ambit short story prizes. Her work has been published in The Irish Times, The Lonely Crowd, Crannóg and Bare Fiction. She edits The Cormorant, a broadsheet of prose and poetry.

On an island off Ireland's west coast strange things are afoot: two teenage boys set fires while their worlds fall apart, a couple drive out to the hills in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, a widow seeks a stranger's help to bury her grief and a horse crashes a house party. Adrift in the treacherous waters of small-town boredom, the residents reach out with love and cruelty, desperation and hope, in their pursuit of connection.

Pure Gold is a bitterly funny, surprising and profoundly moving short story collection that crackles with the thrilling energy of a bold new literary voice, John Patrick McHugh. 

John Patrick McHugh is from Galway. His fiction has appeared in Granta, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, The Tangerine, and Winter Papers. Pure Gold, published in 2021, is his debut collection. 

In a London graveyard in 1857, Miss Harriet Small is approached by a stranger with an intriguing gift for her. In the last will of a woman she barely remembers, Harriet has been left a collection of long-lost papers: her father’s True Narrative of his years after escaping enslavement in America, and his close relationship with Irish revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald.

Nearly sixty years earlier, in the aftermath of Edward’s death and disgrace in the 1798 Rebellion, his sister, Lady Lucy, commissioned Harriet’s father, Mr Anthony Small, to write about his life as Edward’s manservant in the form of a ‘slave narrative’. But what emerges from Faithful Tony’s pages is Lucy’s real motive (revealed in her notes and deletions) to restore Edward’s reputation and his family’s fortunes, as well as a complex, co-dependent and sometimes turbulent allyship between the two men. Tony gains opportunities to work, to prosper, to love, only to be powerless in preventing the devastating events that destroy his master. He learns that the quest to be truly heard is never-ending, and as heartbreaking as it is to read her father’s words, Harriet comes to realise there is more than one way to be free.

Inspired by true events, from war in South Carolina to the genteel drawing rooms of Kildare, from the colonial politics of London to the intrigue and simmering resentments of Dublin, Words to Shape My Name imagines the powerful story that Tony Small might have told, one of hope, failure, resilience and an unbreakable bond.

Laura McKenna is a writer of fiction and poetry and worked for many years as a child psychiatrist. Words to Shape My Name was longlisted for the 2019 Bath Novel Award, a winner at the 2020 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, and formed the creative element of her PhD in creative writing. She is the recipient of Tyrone Guthrie, Cork County Council, John Montague Mentorship (Munster Literature Centre) and Arts Council bursaries. Twice nominated for a Hennessy Literary Award and a Forward Prize for poetry, Laura’s work has been published in The RTÉ Guide, Southword, Banshee and New Irish Writing.

Christmas is not a joyous occasion for everyone. Not at the Cross. Yet hope and humour remain.

Blaithnaid's relationship with Kieran is not good. She has allies in Nadina the prostitute who soothes her with potatoes and Yoichi a Japanese neighbour who offers tea but only a little sympathy. David a neighbour supplies something approaching a festive Christmas with plum pudding and White Christmas. There is snow, there are Christmas lights and there are friends meeting for drinks. There is violence, there are threats and there is heartache. How will Blaithnaid find her way through all of this?

Christmas at the Cross - a Kings Cross story - is a novella in five parts from Bridge House Publishing. Maeve Murphy creates a compelling text, an authentic voice and a real sense of place.

Maeve Murphy was born in Belfast and educated at Cambridge University. As a writer-director she has made 3 acclaimed and award-winning features. Silent Grace was selected to represent the UK at Cannes and in 2020 The Irish times put it in their Top 50 Irish Films Ever Made. Christmas at the Cross published by Bridge House Publishing is her debut novel. It was originally serialised in The Irish Times.

Discover this bitingly honest, darkly funny debut novel about a toxic relationship and secret female desire, from an emerging star of Irish literature.

Love was the final consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as a force which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it. There was no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what I had cultivated instead. Oh, don't laugh at me for this, for being a woman who says this to you. I hear myself speak.

Even now, even after all that took place between us, I can still feel how moved I am by him. Ciaran was that downy, darkening blond of a baby just leaving its infancy. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. None of it mattered in the end; what he looked like, who he was, the things he would do to me. To make a beautiful man love and live with me had seemed - obviously, intuitively - the entire point of life. My need was greater than reality, stronger than the truth, more savage than either of us would eventually bear. How could it be true that a woman like me could need a man's love to feel like a person, to feel that I was worthy of life? And what would happen when I finally wore him down and took it?

Megan Nolan lives in London and was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays, fiction and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The White Review, The Sunday Times, The Village Voice, The Guardian and in the literary anthology, Winter Papers. She writes a fortnightly column for the New Statesman. Acts of Desperation is her first novel.

A young woman's body floats in the Dubai marina. Her death alters the fates of six people, each one striving for a better life in an unforgiving city.
A young Irish man comes to stay with his sister, keen to erase his troubled past in the heat of the Dubai sun. A Russian sex worker has outsmarted the system so far - but will her luck run out? A Pakistani taxi driver dreams of a future for his daughters. An Emirate man hides the truth about who he really is. An Ethiopian maid tries to carve out a path of her own.
From every corner of the globe, Dubai has made promises to them all. Promises of gilded opportunities and bright new horizons, the chance to forget the past and protect long-held secrets.
But Dubai breaks its promises, with deadly consequences. In a city of mirages, how do you find your way out? 

Jamie O'Connell has had short stories highly commended by the Costa Short Story Award and the Irish Book Award Short Story of the Year. He has been longlisted for BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines Short Story Competition and shortlisted for the Maeve Binchy Travel Award and the Sky Arts Futures Fund. He has an MFA and MA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin. He has worked for Penguin Random House, Gill Books and O'Brien Press. Diving for Pearls is his first novel.

When Michael Connelly was a child in the 1970’s, his mother told him about all the things that happened to her in that place. All that the nuns had done. The doctors encouraged Elaine to talk, and talk she did. She even tried to  tell the public. She wrote letters to the newspapers. She made signs and picketed mass. The good pious parishioners silenced her. The doctors told her she was delusional. Her husband didn’t post the letters. Her son didn’t believe her.

Three decades alter, still caught in the guilt from that time. Michael was watching the news about the mother and baby homes unfolding, and realises, with his mother long gone, that she had been telling the truth all those years ago.

FALLEN is a stark reminder and beautifully written account of the impact on one family of a shameful chapter in modern Irish history. 

Mel O ‘Doherty was shortlisted for the Francis MacManus Award in 2019. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Sean O Faolain International Short Story Award and longlisted for The Sunday Times Short Story Award. His stories have been published in Southword Literary Journal and The Irish Times and broadcast on RTE Radio. He is an English teacher by profession. Fallen is his debut novel. He lives in Douglas, Cork with his wife and three children.

They say boys don't cry. But Finn's seen his Da do it when he thinks no one's looking, so that's not true. And isn't it OK to be sad, when bad things happen? They say boys don't cry, but you might... 

Fíona Scarlett is from Dublin but now living in Co. Kildare with her husband and two children. She holds an MLitt in creative writing from the University of Glasgow as well as a masters in early childhood education. She was awarded the Denis O’Driscoll Literary Bursary through Kildare County Council in 2019 and a Literature

Bursary through the National Arts Council Ireland in 2020. She works full time as a primary school teacher and Boys Don’t Cry is her debut novel.

A wife yearns to escape the tight-fisted confines of a package holiday. A boy dreams of footballing greatness as his mother mourns a loss. A man tries to assemble an absent child's playhouse, with impossible instructions and too much beer. A woman seeks clarity from automated voices. A father is distracted from Christmas tree shopping with his son by the looming pressure of quarterly sales targets.

Shine/Variance captures the tiny crises and wonders of daily life with warmth, wit and decisive clarity. Ordinary people - commuters, call centre workers, children and parents - struggle for stability while craving more, and the schism between expectation and reality is only rarely bridged. Yet, amidst the faltering, recognition and bright moments of hope still illuminate their days.
Fresh, tender and darkly funny, these stories are a window into the longings, frustrations and painfully human connections of ordinary life from a remarkable new voice in fiction. 

Stephen Walsh lives in Dublin and works in IT. He started writing seriously in 2018. Since then his stories have been shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize, Royal Society of Literature V. S. Pritchett Short Story Award, the RTE Francis MacManus Story Competition, Fish Short Story Prize, longlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards and published in The White Review, The Stinging Fly and broadcast on RTE Radio.