News in brief – Alice Munro, Claire Keegan, and The International Literature Festival Dublin
Alice Munro, Nobel Prize winner, dies aged 92.
The Canadian short story writer and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro has died at the age of 92.
Dance of the Happy Shades, Lives of Girls and Women, The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flow and Rose, Runaway, and Dear Life are among her most acclaimed short story collections. She won the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in 2013.
Munro was described as “the Canadian Chekhov” by Cynthia Ozick and was praised as “a master of the form” by Salman Rushdie. Her short stories often focused on small-town life and its myriad complications. Munro was focused and disciplined in mind and body: she wrote for three hours every morning and kept fit by walking for three hours every day.
I want my stories to be something about life that causes people not to say, “Oh, isn’t that the truth,” but to feel some kind of reward from the writing. And that doesn’t mean that it was to have a happy ending or anything — but just that everything the story tells moves [you] in such a way that you feel you’re a different person when you finish.
Alice Munro
International Literature Festival Dublin (ILFD) hosts 230 literary and creative events over ten days
Merrion Square Park in Dublin City is the venue for over 230 events showcasing authors, poets, creatives, speakers and performers, including Richard E. Grant, Marian Keyes, Amor Towles, Marilynne Robinson, Liz Pichon, Marlon James, Jhumpa Lahiri, Olivia Laing, and Naomi Alderman.
The ILFD festival will run for ten days, from the 17th to the 26th of May.
Irish Novelist and short story writer Claire Keegan wins the Siegfried Lenz Prize
Keegan’s works of fiction are internationally acclaimed and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Best American Short Stories and The Paris Review.
Her novella Small Things Like These won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Ambassadors’ Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2022.
Small Things Like These was adapted into a film by Enda Walsh and stars Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, and Eileen Walsh. Keegan’s short story An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) was also adapted to film by Colm Bairéad and nominated for an Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2023.
