Irish women ghost writers: Rediscovering lost voices
Jen Herron discovered Irish women ghost writers in anthologies, then another in her own attic
Women writers
In the 1980s I loved many men. I’d completely overlooked the women
Our series celebrating 50 years of women’s writing surveys the fiction, poetry and nonfiction of the early 1980s
A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò: An intimate portrait of poverty and wealth in Nigeria
Follow-up to much-admired debut Stay with Me focuses on characters from opposite sides of the track
‘He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm’: Men miswrite women. In the late 1970s it was time to create a feminist tradition
Our series celebrating 50 years of women’s writing surveys the fiction, poetry and nonfiction of the second half of the 1970s
From Toni Morrison to Edna O’Brien and Nawal El Saadawi: 50 years of the best in women’s writing
These are the authors who exposed the patriarchal bias in English literature in the 1970s
In praise of Jennifer Johnston
Irish Times Blook Club: Novelist has chronicled the family across a century of troubled Irish history
In praise of Biddy Jenkinson, by Caitlín Nic Íomhair
The Irish language poet is famously private, but her work is anything but witholding, full of love and laughter, amazement and hope
In praise of Anne Haverty by Manchán Magan
Irish women writers: ‘A skilled wordsmith capable of wielding an inked scalpel to delightful and dastardly effect’
In praise of Nuala Ní Chonchúir by Cathy Dillon
Irish Women Writers: ‘Ní Chonchúir doesn’t shrink from tackling life’s pain, compromises and savagery, but her rich, original imagery captures its sensual delights also’
In praise of Iris Murdoch, by Ian d’Alton
Irish Women Writers: one of the great writers in English, her relationship as a southern Protestant exile with the land of her birth, as explored in both her fiction and personal life, was conflicted but fascinating
An Irish literary set that was more Bloomsbury than barstool
The Women Writers’ Club hung out in Robert’s Cafe and Jammet’s, not McDaid’s or the Palace Bar, but this radical group fostered a distinctive, modern and decidedly female literary canon
In praise of Eilís Dillon, by Robert Dunbar
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘she conveys a poetic, often elegiac, sense of place and portrays characters with richness and depth’
In praise of Medbh McGuckian, by Adrienne Leavy
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘she challenges stereotypical representations of femininity and interrogates nationalist tropes of Ireland as woman’
In praise of Mary Anne Sadlier, a literary figurehead of Catholic North America
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘she gave voice to the preoccupations of a large section of the Irish-American community’
In praise of Mary O’Donnell, by Eamon Maher
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Rather than constantly dealing with the same material and the same human dilemmas, she seeks out new horizons’
‘I loved your Irish women writers poster – here’s one I made earlier’
Mary Shine had a pleasant surprise when she opened The Irish Times last Saturday. Our poster brought back happy memories of her own project, which she is delighted to share
In praise of Mary Costello, by Ethel Rohan
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Skilled, observant and empathetic, Mary Costello chronicles the specific and telling details of everyday lives in pivotal circumstances, and captures human yearning at its most instructive and affecting’
In praise of the Women Writers’ Club, by Deirdre Brady
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘This pioneering coterie left behind a literary legacy that advocated education for women, freedom of expression and egalitarian values which still hold true today’
In praise of Caitríona O’Reilly, by Neil Hegarty
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She understands the limitations of the self and the fragility of the world – but this awareness of temporality in its turn gives O’Reilly’s work its authority and its arresting, lyrical power’
In praise of Tana French, by Claire Coughlan
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘You never get the tired trope of the same weary detective with an ex-wife and a drink problem, common to many crime series. What you do get is crackling dialogue, and whip-smart observations on the Irish zeitgeist’
In praise of Dervla Murphy, by Rosita Sweetman
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Not only is Dervla (true desire in Gaelic) a wonderful writer, she goes out and does stuff – physically, often politically, wildly dangerous stuff, cycling and living for months on end in Gaza, Africa, Afghanistan, India, the Urals’
In praise of Maria Edgeworth, by Margaret Kelleher
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Read the novels and you’ll find much more mischief than morals, along with wit, compelling characters and keen human understanding’
In praise of Jennifer Johnston, by Eileen Battersby
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Jennifer Johnston is canny; her laconic narrators reveal her sophisticated grasp of the many faces of Irishness’
In praise of Maeve Brennan, by Anne Enright
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘The line between holding it together and falling apart is thinner here than anywhere else in Irish fiction’
In praise of Edna O’Brien, by Eimear McBride
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘I fell in love with the deep, beautiful humanity of her prose and the incautious honesty of her portrayal of the Irish female experience’
In praise of Lady Gregory, by Colm Tóibín
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Her translations of Irish poems and songs have a tender simplicity and immediacy’
In praise of Elizabeth Bowen, by John Banville
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Had Elizabeth Bowen been a man, she would be recognised as one of the finest novelists of the 20th century’
In praise of Mary Lavin, by Belinda McKeon
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She depicted with immense power the inner lives of women’
In praise of Kate O’Brien, by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Kate O’Brien is a master of classic realism. And that’s okay now. Mount Parnassus has many mansions’
In praise of Molly Keane, by Ciarán Carty
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Nobody saw through the ascendancy classes more perceptively or wittily than one of their own’
In praise of Eavan Boland, by Gerard Smyth
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She pioneered a poetic language for those living unseen lives in the new territories of Dublin suburbia’
In praise of Somerville and Ross, by Anne Haverty
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘The Real Charlotte’ may be the best Irish novel, qua novel, of any century
Portraits of the artists as women
To mark International Women’s Day we’ve created an antidote to the all-male Irish Writers poster of bars and student bedrooms. Download your poster here
Charlotte Brooke: 'a glow of cultivated genius'
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘in translating the work of the Gaelic poets into English, she was to influence Thomas Moore and later William Butler Yeats. Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry, published in the year of the French Revolution, was and remains revolutionary’
In praise of Marian Keyes, by Claire Hennessy
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘if you’ve ever read her work you know just how carefully she juxtaposes her sharp observations and wit against sadness and pain’
In praise of Bridget O’Connor, by Martin Doyle
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She brought a non-sentimental, unexpected, visceral approach to each scene that made her screenwriting exciting and exceptional. Great movie writers are rare in this country and she was one of them’
In praise of Patricia Lynch, by Leeann Lane
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘The tattered state of my copy of Lynch’s childhood autobiography A Storyteller’s Holiday was a testament to much re-reading’
In praise of Kate O’Brien, by Anthony Glavin
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘I’m still all but stopping strangers to ask have they too discovered, however belatedly, one of our finest novelists?’
In praise of Maeve Binchy, by Sinéad Crowley
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘It wasn’t until I reread the book over two decades later that I fully appreciated Maeve Binchy’s gift for mixing light with shade’
In praise of Elizabeth Bowen, by Roy Foster
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Elizabeth Bowen’s prose is supercharged, spring-loaded, allusive and often very funny. She writes about Ireland with a kind of controlled passion’
In praise of Augusta Gregory, by Patrick Lonergan
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Gregory has long been recognised as a great Irish person – but it’s time for her to be recognised as a great Irish writer too’
In praise of Michelle O’Sullivan, by Gerald Dawe
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Her poems are tuned to the visible world but carry within marvellous, haunting refrains of absences’
In praise of Anne Enright, by Ed O’Loughlin
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Her phrases have the cadence of a softly falling tide’
The work of Molly Keane exploded into my head
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Keane is a master of the glittering shallows, leading the unsuspecting reader into the squelchy horrors beneath’
In praise of Marina Carr, by Orlaith McBride
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Marina’s work is infused with a rawness, a dynamism and an energy unlike almost any other contemporary playwright’
In praise of Emma Donoghue, by Joseph O’Connor
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She can do everything: be funny, be moving, be unflinching yet sensitive, write beautifully nuanced sentences and utterly gripping stories’
In praise of Kate O’Brien, by Frank McNally
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She’s on record somewhere as distrusting humour on principle. But her very seriousness now seems admirable’
In praise of Lady Gregory, by Lisa Coen
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Gregory’s translations weren’t perfunctory; they were vibrant, gory fun’
In praise of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, by Martina Evans
Celebrating Irish Women Writers: ‘Like Alice Munro, Ní Dhuibhne is a funny, original and brave chronicler of the lives of women’
In praise of Nuala O’Faolain, by Rosita Boland
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Are You Somebody made a feminist of me, although I don’t think I knew that until now’
In praise of Deirdre Madden, by Jennifer Johnston
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She has imagination, calm and a splendid anger’
In praise of Edna O’Brien, by Mary Costello
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Edna wears no armour, and the thought of her bravery and the weight of feeling she’s carried around for eight decades, almost breaks me’
In praise of Claire Keegan, by Colin Barrett
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Very few novels have the formal perfection, narratorial poise and sublime ability to make the unsaid and unsayable glow, as Foster does’
In praise of Peig Sayers, by Sara Baume
Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Elegant prose it isn’t, but there are few authors with a more authentically Irish voice. Peig Sayers spoke for generations of poor, uneducated Irish women who never had the opportunity to speak for themselves’
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