Submissions for 2022 Book Prize

In the seaside town of Tramore, County Waterford, visitors arrive in waves with the tourist season, reliving the best days of their childhoods in its caravan parks, chippers and amusement arcades.
Local teenager Helen Grant is indifferent to the charm of her surroundings; she dreams of escaping to art college with her glamorous classmate Stella Swaine and, from there, taking on the world. But leaving Tramore is easier said than done. Though they don’t know it, Helen and Stella’s lives are pulled by tides beyond their control.
Following the Grant and Swaine families and their neighbours over three decades, The Amusements is a luminous and unforgettable story about roads taken and not taken – and a brilliantly observed portrait of a small-town community.
Aingeala Flannery is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. She has completed an MFA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin. Her short story ‘Visiting Hours’ was the winner of the 2019 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition. In 2020 and 2021, she was awarded a Literature Bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland. Her work has appeared in The Bath Anthology and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio One as part of the Francis MacManus Short Story Competition. She lives in Dublin. The Amusements is her first book.

Hearts and Bones is a book about relationships. It explores what love does to us, and how we survive it.
First-time lovers make mistakes; brothers and sisters try to forgive one another; and parents struggle and fail and struggle again. Teenage souls are swayed by euphoric faith in a higher power and then by devotion to desire, trapped between different notions of what might be true. Quiet revolutions happen in living rooms, on river banks, in packed pubs and empty churches, and years later we wonder why we ever did the things we did.
Set between Ireland and London in the first two decades of this millennium, the stories in Hearts and Bones, Niamh Mulvey's debut collection, look at the changes that have torn through these times and ask who we are now that we've brought the old gods down. Witty, sharply observed and deeply moving, these ten stories announce an extraordinary new Irish literary talent.

Niamh Mulvey is from Kilkenny, Ireland, and is now based in South London. Her short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee and Southword and was shortlisted for the Seán O’Faoláin Prize for Short Fiction 2020. Hearts and Bones is her first collection of short stories, and Picador will publsih her debut novel, The Amnedments, in 2024.

An Irish vagrant with a strange ability wanders Kew Gardens. She knows that the fine weather is going to break and the impending rain casts her mind back to a riverbank where a shady fisherman once asked for her help.
The same fisherman, years later, runs into a childhood friend and becomes intrigued by his wife. She in turn is charmed by his boldness and his confidence. One day she goes out for a walk and never returns.
In another time, in another place, a photographer notices two ghostly figures - of a man and a woman - on pictures developed from his vintage lens. The images become clearer with each roll of film, but his dogged investigation of the mystery could cost him dearly.
So spool out the lives in Catchlights: the past contains the present and future; acts of cruelty, love, selfishness and kindness reverberate for years.

Niamh Prior lives in County Cork, not far from where she grew up by the sea. She holds a BA in English with Film and TV Studies from Brunel University London, and an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing from UCC. Her postgraduate studies were funded by scholarships from UCC and the Irish Research Council, and she has been awarded bursaries by Cork County Council and The Arts Council. Her poetry has been shortlisted or highly commended in competitions including the Patrick Kavanagh Award, Cúirt New Writing Prize, The Dermot Healy Award and the Sylvia Plath Prize, and she was overall winner of the iYeats International Poetry Competition. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in publications including The Stinging Fly, Southword, The North, and The London Magazine. She is currently working on her next book.

On a boat offshore, a fisherman guts a mackerel as he anxiously awaits a midnight rendezvous.
Villagers, one by one, disappear into a sinkhole beneath a yew tree.
A nameless girl is taped, bound and put on display in a countryside market.
A man returning home following the death of his mother finds something disturbing among her personal effects.
A dazzling and disquieting collection of stories, how to gut a fish places the bizarre beside the everyday and then elegantly and expertly blurs the lines. An exciting new Irish writer whose sharp and lyrical prose unsettles and astounds in equal measure, Sheila Armstrong’s exquisitely provocative stories carve their way into your mind and take hold.

Sheila Armstrong is a writer from the northwest of Ireland. She spent ten years in publishing and now works as a freelance editor. Her first collection of short stories, How To Gut A Fish, was published in 2022 and her debut novel, Falling Animals, will follow in 2023.

In 1982, Nuala Malin struggles to stay connected, to her husband, to motherhood, to the smallness of her life in the belly of a place that is built on hate and stagnation. Her children keep her tethered to this life she doesn't want. She finds unexpected refuge with a seventeen-year-old boy, but this relationship is only temporary, a sticking plaster on a festering wound. It cannot last and when her chance to leave Northern Ireland comes, Nuala takes it.
In 1994, Sam Malin plans escape. She longs for a life outside her dysfunctional family, far away from the North and its troubles, free from her brooding father Patsy, who never talks about her mother, Nuala; a woman Sam barely knew, who abandoned them twelve years ago. She finds solace in music, drugs and her friend Becca, but most of all in an illicit relationship with a jagged, magnetic older man.

Olivia Fitzsimons is from Northern Ireland, and is now living in Wicklow. She started writing at the close of 2017. Her debut novel, The Quiet Whispers Never Stop, published by John Murray Press, was shortlisted for the 2022 Butler Literary Award. She is a 2023 recipient of the Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris/Literature Ireland Residency and a Dean Arts Studio Residency in Dublin for 2022/23. During the Irish Writers Centre Evolution Programme 2021 she was a teaching intern for a semester at National University Galway. Olivia has been awarded Literary grants from the Arts Council of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, The Cormorant and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She holds a BA Hons in History from TCD and MA in Film from DIT. She reads for The Stinging Fly and is working on her second novel.

Lauren Foley’s debut collection of dramatic short stories, Polluted Sex, is fearless in its depiction of women’s bodies and sexuality, offering an unflinching window into Irish girl and womanhood.

Lauren Foley is Irish/Australian and bisexual. Her stories are published internationally, including in Overland, The Irish Times, Award Winning Australian Writing, Lighthouse, No Alibis and gorse. She has Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) and is disabled; the majority of her writing is dictated. In 2016, her story ‘K-K-K’ won the inaugural Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize with Overland Literary Journal and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Short Story of the Year. She was shortlisted for the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year in 2017; and nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Lauren was awarded a 2018-19 Next Generation Artist's Award in Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland.

The Flowers of Srebrenica is a novel written by Dr Aidan Hehir and illustrated by David Frankum. It describes a journey from the Bosnian capital Sarajevo to the genocide memorial centre at Srebrenica. The novel focuses on the potency of memory and the dilemmas experienced by academics working on atrocity crimes. Though the subject matter is inherently tragic, the book is interspersed with humorous moments and often light-hearted illustrations.

Born and raised in Limerick, Dr Aidan Hehir is a Reader in International Relations at the University of Westminster. He is the author of numerous academic books on humanitarian intervention and transitional justice in the Balkans. His poetry has been published in various magazines including Bare Fiction and Confluence and he has collaborated with various recording artists on spoken-word poetry pieces. His play "A Wake" was staged at Southwark Playhouse in London in 2018, and his play "A Leap of Faith" won "Best Play" and "Best Original Script" at the 2020 Duncan Rand Festival. The Flowers of Srebrenica is his first non-academic book.

David Frankum’s illustrations and design work can be found in a variety of publications including books, magazine, comics and album covers. He has also published books, designed posters, provided businesses with designs and created artist’s impressions for architectural companies. David has exhibited his work in renowned galleries and museums, and he is currently the Art Specialist at Luton Primary School. 

'People were forever telling her how lucky she was. But what did people know?’

Dublin 1966. When Joan Quinn, a factory girl from the Cranmore Estate, marries Martin Egan, it looks like her dreams have come true. But all is not as it seems.
Joan lives in the shadow of a secret – the couple’s decision to give up their first daughter for adoption only months before.
For the next three decades, Joan’s marriage and her relationship with her second child Carmel suffer as a consequence.
Then one day in 1996, a letter arrives from their eldest daughter. Emma needs her birth parents’ help; it’s a matter of life and death. And the fragile facade of Joan’s life finally begins to crack.

Bernadette Jiwa was born into a house with no books and a home full of stories, in Dublin, Ireland. She is an Irish Australian author who began her writing apprenticeship as a blogger and non-fiction writer in her mid-forties. Bernadette migrated from Ireland to the UK in the 1980s, raised three sons with her husband, and now lives in Melbourne, Australia. She is the creator and leader of The Story Skills Workshop — a program that has taught thousands of people to harness the power of their everyday stories. The Making of Her is her first novel, published in 2022 by Dutton in the US and Penguin Random House in Australia.

Frank Whelan is the seventh son of a seventh son, so by now should have inherited his father's legendary healing power, but still hasn't managed to graduate beyond small-time skin afflictions.
He already feels adrift when his twin, Bernie, reveals a life-changing decision that calls into question everything Frank thought he knew about his place in the family. And then he discovers his father had been keeping secrets of his own.
And so Frank turns to an unlikely source for guidance and finds himself on a quest for answers... from this world, and the next.

Kathleen Murray was born in Carlow and educated at Trinity College Dublin. She worked and travelled in Canada, the UNited States, and south-east ASia before settling in Dublin. Her writing journey began in 2006 at the Irish Writer's Centre, when she signed up for a beginner's class with Nuala Ni Dh.  She was first published in The Stinging Fly and since then has published work in The Moth, Dublin Review, Prairie Schooner and various anthologies. In 2007 she was the first Irish winner of the Fish Short Story prize. Her story, Storm Glass, was a finalist for the 2011 Davy Byrne Short story Award. This is her first novel.

Haunted by the murder of his sister, Detective Sergeant John Lazarus scours the streets of Dublin chasing down the men who have surrendered to the darkness inside them. The monsters who prey on the most vulnerable in society are in his sights and he hunts them relentlessly.
His specialist officers are fighting to protect a vulnerable young victim from vicious mobsters when they are brought in to investigate an attack on a student teacher that leaves her hovering between life and death. He has no witnesses and barely any clues – but knows he has to catch the attacker before he strikes again.
Abandoned by his bosses, tormented by his past, Lazarus goes to war with a crime gang and a high profile reporter, a man who has a knack of getting under the detective’s skin – and who appears to know even more than the cops.
Pretty soon, his career, reputation and marriage are all hanging by a thread as Lazarus finds himself in a desperate race against time to save a young girl from the mob and catch a monster – all the while fighting the most important battle of his life: the battle inside his own head.
Can he let go of his dark past, or will the Black Light hiding inside Lazarus destroy everything he holds dear?

Michael O'Toole is a crime writer in Dublin, Ireland.
He was born in Belfast in 1970 and has been a crime reporter in Dublin for more than 20 years.
He specialises in covering organised crime.
He has written several non-fiction books, but has now published his first novel, Black Light. It is set in Dublin.
He studied Italian and French at university and also speaks Spanish and is learning Arabic.
He has won four national awards for his crime journalism.
He was voted crime journalist of the year in 2017 and 2021.
And he also won crime story of the year in 2017 and in 2018.
He is married with three children.

Dublin, 7 October 2019
One day, one city, two women: Ruth and Pen. Neither known to the other, but both asking themselves the same questions: how to be with others and how, when the world doesn't seem willing to make space for them, to be with themselves?
Ruth's marriage to Aidan is in crisis. Today she needs to make a choice - to stay or not to stay, to take the risk of reaching out, or to pull up the drawbridge.
For teenage Pen, today is the day the words will flow, and she will speak her truth to Alice, to ask for what she so desperately wants.
Deeply involving, poignant and radiantly intelligent, it is a portrait of the limits of grief and love, of how we navigate our inner and outer landscapes, and the tender courage demanded by the simple, daily quest of living.

Emilie Pine is Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published widely as an academic and critic. She teaches and supervises student work in the fields of theatre and memory cultures and is Director of the Irish Memory Studies Research Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com) and Editor of the Irish University Review and recently edited the Special Issue on Moving Memory: The Dynamics of the Past in Irish Culture.
Emilie’s first collection of personal essays, Notes to Self, won the Butler Literary Award, the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year Award, and Book of the Year 2018 at the Irish Book Awards. Ruth & Pen is her first novel.

Dublin student life is ending for Sophie and her friends. They've got everything figured out, and Sophie feels left behind as they all start to go their separate ways. Then, at a party, what was already unstable completely falls apart and Sophie finds herself obsessively scrolling social media, waiting for something (anything) to happen.
None of This Is Serious is about the uncertainty and absurdity of being alive today. It's about balancing the real world with the online, and the vulnerabilities in yourself, your relationships, your body. At its heart, this is a novel about the friendships strong enough to withstand anything.

Catherine Prasifka was born in Dublin in 1996. She studied English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and has an MLitt in Fantasy from the University of Glasgow. She is obsessed with learning about how stories work and has ruined nearly all of her favourite books and movies by overanalysing them. She works as a creative writing teacher in Dublin. None of This Is Serious is her first novel.

A witty and warm debut novel from a young Irish writer. A story of family, grief, and the ways we come together when all seems lost.
Molly Black has disappeared. She's been flighty since her parents died, but this time - or so says her hastily written note - she's gone for good.
That's why the whole Black clan - from Granny perched on the printer to Killian on Zoom from Sydney - is huddled together in the Dublin suburbs, arguing over what to do.
Former model Lady V presumes Molly's just off taking drugs and sleeping with strangers - which is fine by her. Cousin Anne, tired of living in Molly's shadow, is keeping quiet, and cousin Bobby is distracted by his own issues.
But Molly's disappearance is eerily familiar to Uncle John. He is determined never to lose anyone again. Especially not his niece, who is more like her mum than she realises.

Alice Ryan grew up in Dublin. After moving to London to study at the LSE, she spent ten years working in the creative industries, holding roles in publishing, film and TV. She was Head of Insight and Planning at BBC Studios before returning to Ireland. She now works at The Arts Council of Ireland and lives in Dublin with her husband Brian and their daughter Kate.