Shortlist Announced for the Irish Book Awards 2021!
The Shortlist for the Irish Book Awards was announced this afternoon and there are some great books and authors on this year’s list, which was announced virtually on Twitter.
The over-riding motivation behind the awards is to celebrate the extraordinary quality of Irish writing, to help bring the best books to a wider readership annually, and to promote an industry under severe competitive pressures.
From a small base of three initial categories, the awards now include fifteen categories spanning the literary genres. Thousands of ordinary readers vote to select the winners every year. Libraries and bookshops showcase the best books of the year in the critical sales period of the fourth quarter. The Awards Dinner has become the major event in the literary calendar with Taoisigh and Presidents as guests of honour. This obviously won’t be happening this year, but as with previous years, highlights of the awards have been shown on RTÉ television.
The An Post Irish Book Awards brings together the entire literary community – readers, authors, booksellers, publishers and librarians – to recognise and celebrate the very best of Irish literary talent across fifteen categories, including Novel of the Year, Popular Fiction, Non-fiction, Crime, Children’s, Sports, Short Stories and Cookery.
Here are a few of the categories that I am particularly interested in:
Eason Novel of the Year
Who I Would Like to Win: To be fair, I’ve only read two of these, Small Things Like These and White City and I loved both so would be happy to see either win.
Who Will Win: Let’s face it. Put Sally Rooney in a shortlist and she’ll probably win…
Irish Independent Crime Fiction Book of the Year
Who I Would Like to Win: Well, since I haven’t read any of these, I’m not really best placed to say, but I am very partial to Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan series so I’ll go with her.
Who Will Win: Catherine Ryan Howard and Steve Cavanagh are both very popular here in Ireland so I’ll put my money on one of them.
Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year
Who I Would Like to Win: Without a doubt, Una Mannion. I love her poetry, she’s a fantastic person and A Crooked Tree is a wonderful coming of age story.
Who Will Win: I would say Sarah Gilmartin could lift this one for Dinner Party: A Tragedy. It didn’t completely work for me, but it has been very well received.
Library Association of Ireland Author of the Year
I’m not even going to try and hazard a guess with this category because it is SUCH a strong one. I’ve read and enjoyed all these authors but this is almost impossible to call. Donal Ryan won Irish Book of the Year last year for Strange Flowers so could be in with a good shot, but it’s hard when you are up against the institution that is Marian Keyes!
Writing.ie Short Story of the Year
Who I Would Like to Win: I thought that Bernard MacLaverty’s new short story collection Blank Pages was a bit of a masterpiece. Blackthorns wasn’t my favourite of the stories, but it was very timely. I’d love to see Jan Carson win this though.
Who Will Win: Bernard or Roddy.
You can read all the shortlisted short stories here.
The An Post Bookshop of the Year
Who I Would Like to Win: I mean, come on. No Alibis Bookstore all the way!
What’s most fantastic about the Irish Book Awards is that from here on in, the voting is down to the reading public. Voting is now open online, with the winners announced on 23 November and televised on 8 December. An Post Irish Book of the Year will be shown on RTE One and will feature interviews with some of the winning authors and the announcement of the overall An Post Book of the Year.
Awards Irish Literature an post irish book awards irish literature
Cathy746books View All →
I am a 40 something book buying addict trying to reduce the backlog one book at a time!
746books.com 
Thanks so much for all these wonderful shortlisted Irish books!
I’ll save it as reference for #ReadingIrelandMonth22!!
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Glad to be of help!
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There are many wonderful books, authors and shops here, I hope I’ll add some of them to my shelves. The only book I’ve read was Holding Her Breath which was great. I have Panenka, The Echo Chamber and Diving for Pearls on my TBR.
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I have The Echo Chamber too Annabel, it sounds like fun!
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Thanks for posting this, Cathy. I glimpsed it on Twitter last night then got distracted! I’ve read three on the Novel of the Year shortlist including the Keegan which I’d be happy to see win. Just one debut – Dinner Party – although Snowflake’s on my TBR list. I’ll be adding A Crooked Tree, too.
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I enjoyed Snowflake Susan, a refreshing read. Hope you get a chance to read A Crooked Tree, Una is brilliant.
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So cool that the voting is done by the public! I’ll be interested in seeing the results. Especially since many of these books and authors are familiar to me. I also love that the bookshops are included!
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That’s what I like about these awards Naomi – voted for by the public and televised on prime time TV!
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Fun!
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An incredibly strong line-up overall, which is a testament to the quality of the current Irish literary scene. I’m surprised that Lucy Caldwell isn’t in the running for the short story prize, given her recent win in the BBC National Short Story Award. At first I wondered if NI was excluded, but with Belfast’s No Alibis on the Bookshop shortlist that doesn’t seem to be the case?
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Jan Carson is from Belfast too and she is on the list. I was surprised too, that whole collection of Lucy’s was so strong.
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Yes, of course! Do you know if Jan Carson’s BBC NSSA shortlisted story, In the Car with the Rain Coming Down, is included in any of her published collections? I’d love to try a volume of short stories by her…
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I don’t think it is Jacqui. I enjoyed her last book The Last Resort which is a series of interconnected short stories set on a run down caravan park.
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I am putting ‘The Echo Chamber’ by John Boyne on my TBR list, although it apparently has not been released in the US yet. Others may follow.
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Yes, it sounds like great fun!
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I have a few of these on my TBR, so am interested to sed who will win. I will be making up my Reading Ireland list soon.
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Excellent Carla!
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What a super selection, and I love the bookshop category, too!
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Me too – it’s the first year that they have been included.
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The organisers of the Wales Literature Awards could learn a lot from their counterparts across the Irish sea evidently. Our awards are so low key as to be non existent. You are unlikely to find the shortlisted books featured in any bookshop for example. There is an element of the popular vote but I’d love to know how many votes they actually get because you have to work hard to find any announcements about the voting being open.
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Interesting. The Irish Book Awards have worked really hard over the last 5 years or so and have created a real event with these awards.
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The fact they have television interested in the event is remarkable.
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Always jealous of the sheer quantity of literature coming out of Ireland every year! Just goes to prove that Guinness really must be good for you! 😉
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It is. so we’ll just keep drinking it to be sure 🙂
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I’m curious to see how differently voting is handled by different prizes. I’m not convinced that even the “people’s vote” is any more democratic (so much comes down to publicity budgets and publishing houses’ reach) but I appreciate that a variety of systems is, at least, interesting. Isn’t it great to feel that one has all the info at one’s fingertips now that everything is virtual with announcements?!
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I kow what you mean – it also comes down to how popular/ active an author is on social media in order to get their followers to vote for them.
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Yes, exactly. And writers are no more saintly than any other community, so they have all the same opportunities to exploit online voting systems, dishonesty which is perhaps harder to spot than shipments of gold bars to bribe literary prizelist judges. Hee hee
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Thank you for sharing these lists, Cathy… it’s fun to see what’s up for awards and will be helpful come time for Reading Ireland Month ’22. 🙂
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There are some great reads on here!
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I missed seeing this, I’m wondering what was on the nonfiction shortlist as well, will go and check it out. Love that you shared your favourites to win and the most likely.
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Thanks Claire. I didn’t share the nonfiction as I think I hadn’t read any of them.
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Oh I just looked, hoping to see some narrative nonfiction like Sara Baume’s Handiwork and Dorieann Ni Ghriofa’s memoir from last year, nothing of that ilk on there it seems. But keeping an eye out for that kind of Irish lit all the same. 🙂
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Claire, you might like Inventory, a memoir by Darran Anderson about growing up in Derry in the 80s. I loved it.
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Thanks Cathy I’ll look it up.
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