“ There is in the short story at its most characteristic, something we don’t often find in the novel, an intense awareness of human loneliness .” Frank O’Connor
From William Carleton and Elizabeth Bowen to Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín and Sally Rooney, Irish Stories , captures both the mid-twentieth century ‘golden age’ of the Irish short story and its remarkable twenty-first-century resurgence. Editor Christopher Morash argues that the connective tissue is an acute attentiveness to voice, and a recurrent sense of haunting - for the past to break into the present, often in the story’s final, quietly unsettling turn.
The panel discuss whether we are living through a new golden age of Irish fiction, why the short story has outlived predictions of its demise, the relationship between the Irish novel and short fiction today, and how the ‘ghosts’ of Joyce, Bowen and others continue to echo in contemporary work.
Lucy Caldwell is the award-winning author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies and Openings . She is the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories . Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s essays and stories have appeared in Banshee, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Litro and Grist amongst others. She features in the anthology, Stinging Fly Stories. Eoin McNamee is a novelist and screenwriter. His nineteen novels include Resurrection Man and the Blue Trilogy.
In conversation with Christopher Morash, Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity, and the author of numerous books on Irish literature and history, including Dublin: A Writer’s City . Since 2019 he has chaired the judging panel for the International Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest prize for a single work in English.