There were lots of winners at the An Post Irish Book Awards in Dublin, there being so many different categories from fiction, non-fiction, popular fiction, crime fiction to newcomer. From a small base of three categories, the awards now include eighteen categories spanning a broad range of literary genres. Thousands of readers vote to select the winners every year.

The Novel of the Year prize for which there were eight worthy contenders on the shortlist, went to the Booker shortlist nominated Paul Murray for his fourth novel, the tragicomedy The Bee Sting. Read a Q & A with the author here.

Set in a town in the Midlands in 2014, at the tail end of the financial crash, the Barnes family has a car dealership – they’ve just about managed to survive until now, but as the novel begins the business is on the brink of going under, and the family may be going down with it. The book navigates a family facing this calamity with irony, panging emotion and existential tones. Described as a masterful tragicomedy of familial chaos and dynamics. 

The one book I was championing (reviewed here), the moving, courageous and inspiring Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan, scooped two awards, Biography of the Year and the Listener’s Choice award.

Mark O’Connell won the Non-Fiction Book of the Year with his profound confrontation of true crime, A Thread of Violence a negotiation with the act of writing about murder, and a navigation of the chasm and interplay between fiction and non-fiction, taking the infamous case of Malcolm Macarthur as its subject, while Liz Nugent took the Crime Fiction Book of the Year for Strange Diamond Sally.

Newcomer of the Year went to rising Irish talent Colin Walsh for Kala, a gripping literary thriller, set in a small Irish town suffocating on its own secrets as three friends reunite in their hometown where their friend Kala disappeared fifteen years ago.

In an interesting and informative Q & A interview for the prize, Walsh was asked:

Q: Ireland is such a literary powerhouse, was it supportive of new writers?

The short answer is yes – and not just new writers. Ireland’s a literary powerhouse precisely because we’ve got an Arts Council-supported infrastructure of journals, festivals, indie publishers, etc. That creates a rich writing ecosystem, which is essential to maintaining individual artists and the wider literary culture. Writing is unpredictable magic on the page, but magic always needs concrete structures within which to thrive – that’s what Ireland provides for writers, and that’s why we punch so far above our weight internationally.

The winners of the individual categories will go forward to compete for the title of the overall Irish Book of the Year.  The winner is decided by the An Post Irish Book of the Year judging panel. Watch this space!

In 2022 Sally Hayden won that award for her incredible work of nonfiction My Fourth Time, We Drowned.
The nominations for Irish Book of the Year are the six titles shown below: