How the Booker Prize has reflected the new golden age of Irish fiction

The 21st century has witnessed a new golden age for Irish fiction that has been reflected by the Booker Prize, in its longlists and shortlists, as well as in the three winners to come from the island of Ireland in that time. Starting with The Deposition of Father McGreevy by Brian O’Doherty, which made the shortlist in 2000, and continuing up to Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These in 2022, the Irish novels that have met with Booker judges’ approval have reflected the immediate concerns and enduring preoccupations of writers from a rapidly-changing country.

While reviewing fiction on the British side of the Irish Sea for the past decade or so, I have been struck repeatedly by the volume, range and quality of new Irish writing. Ireland continues to produce fresh and sophisticated literary voices at an astonishing rate – and UK agents and publishers are eager to snap them up.  

Indeed, so many good writers have come out of Ireland of late that Paul Murray, Booker longlisted for Skippy Dies (2010), Donal Ryan (longlisted in 2013 for The Spinning Heart and five years later for From A Low and Quiet Sea) and Kevin Barry (longlisted for Night Boat to Tangier in 2019) almost seem like old hands now. Sally Rooney, who made the longlist with Normal People in 2018, has become a literary superstar. 

Decades before this new generation, the Dublin-born Iris Murdoch won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea. Roddy Doyle triumphed in 1993 with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and John Banville was the first Irish winner this century for The Sea (2005), seeing off competition from, among others, his compatriot Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way. Anne Enright won in 2007 for The Gathering. Writers from Northern Ireland have had success too: in 2018, the Belfast-born writer Anna Burns was a surprise winner with her formally-experimental, politically-engaged and laugh-out-loud Milkman. 

A famous literary past could have been inhibiting for contemporary Irish authors, a possibility Sally Rooney mocks in Conversations with Friends, when a character says: ‘No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.’ Burns, who grew up in a Catholic family in Belfast, meanwhile, said after winning the Booker Prize that, while she was flattered by comparisons to Samuel Beckett, she was not convinced she fit into ‘the whole Irish tradition thing’. 

When I visit Dublin, with its literary landmarks, mosaics of playwrights on pub walls and statues of modernist giants, I do wonder how emerging writers coped growing up with Samuel Beckett, Yeats and, more than anyone else, James Joyce towering over them. As the Irish critic Mark O’Connell wrote in an essay on 21st-century Dublin’s relationship with Joyce: ‘There can’t be many cities that are presided over so thoroughly and so minutely by a single artist.’  

Joyce was, I hear, an unpredictable man, but hopefully he would have approved of the integrity and internationalism of Irish fiction that has appeared a century after he was writing. Keegan’s Booker Prize shortlisting last year, and Audrey Magee’s longlisting for The Colony, came in the centenary of Ulysses. Small Things Like These contains whispers of Joyce’s long story ‘The Dead’ in its Christmas setting and its concern with the Catholic Church, in this case the brutality of the horrific Magdalene Laundries. 

Reading this scene recently, I imagined that ‘the corpse next door’ was laughing because it had a premonition that the period of economic growth in Ireland, that was dubbed The Celtic Tiger, would end abruptly with the 2008 global financial crash. The crisis caused devastating unemployment and was a before-and-after moment, so the term ‘post-Celtic Tiger writers’ has been used to categorise the new generation of Irish novelists. Inevitably, they shrug it off but, looking back at some of the interviews I conducted in the past decade, I notice I repeatedly asked Irish writers about the impact of the crisis.  

In 2014, Donal Ryan told me: ‘Tragedy has reattached itself to emigration, with people going abroad for work. There are ghost estates where companies sold houses then folded. When we had storms recently, fences started flying around, because they’d just been placed between crooked concrete posts and left.’ 

Three years later, when Ireland’s economy was growing again and its new wave of writing in full swing, Lisa McInerney, who won the Women’s Prize with her first novel The Glorious Heresies (2016), told me: ‘Possibly some younger writers lost their jobs and thought, “Fuck it, I might as well give writing a proper go.” Maybe the lack of economic opportunities created artistic opportunities. The unhappier Ireland is, the better its writing.’