The University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies has announced the shortlist for the John McGahern Annual Book Prize, worth £5,000 (€5,824) for the best debut novel or short story collection by an Irish writer or writer resident in Ireland published in 2024.
Seventeen entries were read and adjudicated upon by the shortlisting committee of Prof Dame Janet Beer, former vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool; Dr Eleanor Lybeck, senior lecturer in literature at the university and Frank Shovlin, professor of Irish literature at the university.
Prof Shovlin said of this year’s process: “So strong was the field for 2024 that we could not quite narrow the shortlist to three books and are asking our final arbiter, Colm Tóibín, to select from among four entries. Also unusual this year is that for the first time since we inaugurated the prize, all books on the shortlist are novels.
“We look forward to seeing Colm’s final thoughts later this summer and welcoming the winner to read from their work and receive their award at the Liverpool Literary Festival on the weekend of October 17th to 19th.”
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The shortlisted books are Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson (4th Estate); Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Fig Tree); Girl in the Making by Anna Fitzgerald (Sandycove); and The Coast Road by Alan Murrin (Bloomsbury).
The shortlisting committee commented on each of the books:
Anna Fitzgerald’s Girl in the Making is a remarkably strong debut with echoes of both James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. In subject, though not in style, it is reminiscent of one of the 21st century’s strongest debuts, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, following as it does the life of a troubled girl, Jean Kennedy, growing up in south Dublin over 15 years. Coming to maturity surrounded by a beloved mother, a hated father (known only as He or Him throughout), a sexually predatory uncle and her siblings, this coming-of-age novel is ultimately a hopeful consideration of the power of literature to teach, to transform and to heal.
While Hagstone is Sinéad Gleeson’s fiction debut, she has a long-established reputation as a broadcaster, artist and editor. Her essay collection, Constellations: Reflections from Life, won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards. Gleeson’s novel is a haunting meditation on the power and meaning of art. It is set on a remote Irish island and narrated by Nell, a committed but struggling artist who is commissioned by a local women’s commune known as the Iníons to document their community and to create an artwork for their annual celebration of Samhain. Elegantly written, lyrical and serious about art and its imperatives, the narrative is compelling and invites one to a slow read. With intriguing traces of the supernatural throughout, mixed with striking descriptions of the natural world, Hagstone is a profound and moving novel.
Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits has already been so widely lauded it is hard to think of it as a debut. Among its other plaudits are The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, The Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. A striking feat of imagination, Lennon’s novel reimagines the world of ancient Syracuse via the characters of Lampo and Gelon, a pair of unemployed potters who find themselves attempting to stage a play by Euripides using a quarry full of desperate Athenian prisoners of war as their cast.
Narrated as though by contemporary Dubliners, the story quickly absorbs the reader and it is hard not to find yourself rooting for the two lads. Wonderfully realised in its detailed recreation of the ancient Mediterranean world, it also has smart lessons to teach a modern audience about war, the refugee crisis and how kindness can prosper in the face of cruelty.
Winner of the Irish Book Awards Newcomer of the Year 2024, The Coast Road by Alan Murrin, is a sensitive evocation of time, place and feeling, centring on memorable portraits of female protagonists. Murrin attempts to expose some of the untold damage wrought on individuals by repressive and oppressive social and political structures in 1990s Ireland, while considering legacies of that damage still shaping Irish society today. A deeply satisfying read, this is a novel whose central characters stay with the reader long after finishing the book and a writer in whose prose one can completely believe.
Now in its sixth year, previous winners include Adrian Duncan’s Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019); Hilary Fannin’s The Weight of Love (2020); Louise Kennedy’s short story collection, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (2021); Aingeala Flannery’s novel The Amusements (2022); and Michael Magee’s Close to Home (2023).
The John McGahern Prize for Debut Irish Fiction was established to promote new Irish writing and to celebrate the memory of one of the country’s greatest masters of prose fiction, John McGahern (1934-2006). McGahern’s final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, was adapted for cinema with great success by Pat Collins in 2023. The legendary writer’s authorised biography is being written by Prof Shovlin, under contract at Faber.
Prof Pete Shirlow, director of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies, said: “It is heartening, as ever, to see such quality emerging from the Irish literary scene. We at the Institute are honoured to be associated both with work of this calibre and with the name of John McGahern, one of our greatest and most enduring prose stylists. We very much look forward to meeting the winner and hearing them read from their work at October’s festival.”
Entries are now being accepted for debut books of fiction published in 2025. Details are available on the Institute of Irish Studies website.
