Nicola Sturgeon and Andrew O’Hagan are to be the judges of the 2026 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, one of the highlights of Listowel Writers Week, which takes place in the Co Kerry town from May 27th to 31st next year.
The closing date for submissions to be received is January 31st. The shortlist of five titles will be announced in April and the winner of the €20,000 prize, the largest purse in Ireland for an Irish author’s novel, will be revealed on the opening night of the festival.
Nicola Sturgeon was Scotland’s longest serving first minister - serving for almost nine years. As SNP leader, she led her party to eight successive election victories. She is currently the MSP for Glasgow Southside. She also helped lead the Yes campaign in the 2014 independence referendum. She is also an avid reader, citing literature as one of her loves, and has championed many Irish authors. Her autobiography, Frankly, was published in August.
Fellow Scot Andrew O’Hagan is one of his generation’s finest writers and chroniclers of contemporary Britain. Author of five novels, he has three times been nominated for the Booker Prize. He was voted one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He is also a well-known non-fiction writer. His essays and reports have appeared in London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian and the New Yorker. His latest book, On Friendship, is a collection of eight brief essays reworked from a series recorded last year for Radio 4 in which he talks of his friendships with Irish authors Colm Tóibín and Edna O’Brien.
Last year’s award went to Niall Williams for Time of the Child.
In The Irish Times tomorrow, Darragh Geraghty suggests 12 Christmas classics to read over the holidays.
Laureate for Irish Fiction Éilís Ní Dhuibhne selects the best Irish-language books of the year. Other reviews include Andrew Lynch on James Quinn’s Bloody Summer; NJ McGarrigle on Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe; Brigid O’Dea on This is Not a Cookbook; Claire Hennessy on the best YA fiction; Frank McDonald on Flats and Cottages: Herbert Simms and the Housing of Dublin’s Working Class 1932-48 by Eoin Ó Broin and Mal McCann; Roe McDermott on Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism by Cynthia Miller-Idriss; and Vic Duggan on The Land Trap: a New History of the World’s Oldest Asset by Mike Bird.
This weekend’s Irish Times Eason offer is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, just €5.99, a €6 saving.
*
From River Gulls & City Horses: A Dublin Memoir, an essay by Gerard Smyth, Poetry Editor of The Irish Times, published in the Spring 2024 of the New Hibernia Review, the journal of the Irish studies programme in St Paul, Minnesota, has just been listed among the “Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction of 2024” in The Best American Essays 2025.
