Audrey Magee: 'I loved being a journalist, but I was searching for a different kind of truth'
Audrey Magee talks about seeing the world through an artist’s eyes, the endgame of colonisation and why The Colony is more bildungsroman than fable
Audrey Magee
Audrey Magee was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. She is an Irish novelist and journalist, who lives and works in Wicklow. The Colony is her second novel.
For twelve years, Magee worked as a journalist, writing for, among others, the Times, the Irish Times, the Observer and the Guardian. Her first novel, The Undertaking, was short-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, for France’s PRIX du Premier Roman and for the Irish Book Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The Undertaking has been translated into 10 languages and is being adapted for film.
The summer of 1979. Sectarian murders claim victims across Ireland. An idyllic island fishing community off the west coast becomes the laboratory in which Magee dissects the gulf between what Ireland is and how the rest of the world wants to fantasise it.
— The 2022 judges on The Colony
All nominated books
The Colony was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. In Audrey Magee's lyrical and brooding fable, two outsiders visit a small island off the west coast of Ireland, with unforeseen and haunting consequences.
