The Book Club: The first edition of the Book Club brings Michael Harding together with three readers: Jo Homewood, Jacinta Wright and Hans Zomer to discuss his new book Hanging with the Elephant, Hachette Books Ireland. Presented by Gary Quinn. Sound: JJ Vernon

Michael Harding - Hanging with the Elephant

In this edition of The Irish Times Bookclub best selling author John Boyne discusses his novel A History of Loneliness. He is joined in studio by book club members Jacinta Wright and Hans Zomer. The show is presented by Asstiant Literary Editor Martin Doyle. Sound by JJ Vernon

John Boyne - History of Loneliness

Short story writer Colin Barrett meets The Irish Times Book Club

Colin Barrett - Young Skins

Mary Costello joins Gary Quinn in studio to discuss her latest book Academy Street with book club readers Orna Mulcahy and Lorcan Collins

Mary Costello - Academy Street

MArtin Doyle interviews Eoin McNamee for The Irish Times Book Club

Books - Eoin McNamee - Blue is the Night

Dublin Books Festival 2015 - Harry Clifton, Michael Longley and Paula Meehan in conversation with Arminta Wallace

The Poets Chair Podcast

Rob Doyle discusses his collection of inter-linked fictions, This is the Ritual, his follow-up to his successful debut, Here are the Young Men, with Laura Slattery, co-host of the Irish Times Book Club podcast, in front of a live audience at the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin. The wide-ranging interview explores the author’s autobiographical approach to writing, the writers who populate his fictions and his desire to test boundaries.
 

Rob Doyle

Paul McVeigh - The Good Son

This month's book club features Lucy Caldwell, author of Multitudes, in conversation with Laura Slattery.

Lucy Caldwell

Welcome to the Irish Times Book Club podcast, recorded earlier this month in association with the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin’s Parnell Square. This month’s title is Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, currently shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.

It is 20 years since McCormack’s debut collection of stories, Getting it in the Head, won him the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Two years later came his fist novel, Crowe’s Requiem, then a seven-year gap to its follow up, Notes from A Coma, described by John Waters as the best Irish novel of the decade, then another seven-year gap before his second collection, Forensic Songs in 2012.

Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of author and New Yorker magazine staff writer Maeve Brennan, whose work went largely unnoticed here until after her death, Irish Times books editor Martin Doyle and journalist Patrick Freyne talked to her biographer Angela Bourke.

Remembering Maeve Brennan

Eileen Battersby interviews Conor O'Callaghan about his novel Nothing on Earth at The Irish Writer's Centre.

https://irishwriterscentre.ie

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-book-club

Conor O'Callaghan - Nothing on Earth

Welcome to the Irish Times Book Club podcast for June 2017.

If this is your first time listening, you might be wondering how this works.

Each month we run a series of articles on irishtimes.com on a chosen author. 

And at the end of each month we hold a public interview with that author at The Irish Writer's Centre on Parnell Square here in Dublin. It's free to attend. 

This month our chosen author is Jennifer Johnston. 

Jennifer's first novel The Captains and the Kings was published in 1972 when she was 42. 

Her latest work, Naming the Stars, a haunting tale of love, loss and memory, which was published by Tinder Press last year.

Literary Correspondent Eileen Battersby interviewed Jennifer at The Irish Writer's Centre. 

Check irishtimes.com for information about upcoming Book Club events.

Jennifer Johnston

Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney’s critically acclaimed first novel, has picked up deserved word-of-mouth momentum since it was published earlier this year. In this month’s Irish Times Book Club podcast, recorded live at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin, Rooney explains how it came into being.

For those who have yet to succumb to the pleasure of this talented young author’s debut, Conversations With Friends tells the lucid, painful, addictive, story of 21-year-old Frances, a Dublin student who embarks on a torturous affair with 32-year-old actor Nick, who is married to writer/photographer Melissa, who Frances’s closest friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi has a bit of a crush on.

Published by Faber after a seven-way bidding auction, Conversations with Friends was praised in The Irish Times for its fearless writing, while it was described in the New Yorker as “a new kind of adultery novel”.

The novel - which tracks Frances’s relationship with Bobbi, Nick, Melissa, her parents, her body and her place in the world - unfolds in a wealth of smart exchanges, as Frances plays conversational table tennis and uses analytical language to deflect her emotions and hide the fact that she’s not anywhere near as relentlessly self-composed as she likes to make out.

In this podcast, Rooney explores how she developed the distinctive tone of Conversations With Friends through dialogue, why people sometimes think she is Frances and Frances is her, and how she writes in concentrated, intense periods. She also gives us some hints about her recently submitted and much-anticipated second novel.

Sally Rooney - Conversations With Friends

This month's guest is Sinéad Gleeson, one of Ireland's leading arts journalists. 

She is a former presenter of the book show on RTE radio and the editor of three anthologies of Irish short stories. 

Next year Picador will publish a collection of Sinéad's own essays, provisionally titled 'Constellations'. 

She talked to Martin Doyle at the Irish Writers Centre to discuss The Long Gaze Back, an anthology of Irish Women Writers which Sinead edited. The Long Gaze Back is April's Irish Times Book Club choice.

Sinéad Gleeson - The Long Gaze Back

The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal is May’s Irish Times Book Club choice. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction even before it was published in late March, it is a tragic Birmingham Irish love story set against the backdrop of the IRA bombings that devastated the city in 1974.

Kit spoke to Martin Doyle at the International Literature Festival Dublin last week.

Kit de Waal - The Trick to Time

Books Editor Martin Doyle talks to Helen Cullen about her novel The Lost Letters of William Woolf.

Recorded at the Waterford Writers Festival.

Helen Cullen - The Lost Letters of William Woolf

Laura Slattery talks to Lisa Harding, author of Harvesting.

Lisa Harding - Harvesting

Martin Doyle talks to young author Kevin Breathnach about his acclaimed debut collection of essays, Tunnel Vision, which mixes art history with remarkably candid accounts of his own life. 

Plus: In the five decades since their inception, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Awards have helped to launch the careers of many of Ireland’s best known authors, including Sebastian Barry, Joe O’Connor, Colum McCann and Mike McCormack. Ciaran Carty, curator of the awards, on that prestigious history.

The Books Podcast is sponsored by Green & Blacks.

Kevin Breathnach - Tunnel Vision

April’s Irish Times Books Podcast features interviews with Sinéad Gleeson about her acclaimed collection of personal essays, Constellations, and Sarah Davis-Goff, co-founder of Tramp Press, about her own first novel, Last Ones Left Alive, a dystopian novel set in the west of Ireland in the near future.

Sinéad Gleeson and Sarah Davis-Goff

Laura Slattery interviews children's author Shane Hegarty about what it means to write for children, with their surprisingly strong taste for peril and horror, and how his own kids's brutal honesty helps him to create his books. 

Shane's books for children include the Darkmouth series, which has been praised by critics for its fast-paced action, wit and sophistication. His new book Boot is out now.

Writing for Children - with Shane Hegarty, Author of Boot & The Darkmouth Series

Welcome to The Irish Times Books Podcast, which this week features my interview with Sarah Crossan, Ireland’s Laureate na nÓg.

Crossan is one of Ireland’s most successful Young Adult writers, having won the Carnegie Medal in 2016 for her verse novel, One, and been shortlisted twice, for The Weight of Water and Apple & Rain.

We discuss her latest young adult verse novel Toffee, about a teenager who runs away from an abusive home and befriends an elderly woman.

We also talk about her career, her work as children’s laureate at the halfway stage of her tenure, and her identity as an Irish person growing up and living in Britain.

The Irish Times Books podcast is sponsored by Green & Blacks.

Laureate na nÓg Sarah Crossan

Author Joseph O'Connor talks to Martin Doyle about his new novel Shadowplay, a complicated love affair featuring Dracula creator Bram Stoker, the first Irish writer he fell for.

They also talk about his career from Cowboys & Indians to Star of the Sea, and his next project - a novel based on Hugh O’Flaherty, the Kerry priest who saved more than 6,000 lives from the Nazis in Rome.

Joseph O'Connor - Shadowplay

Welcome to the latest Irish Times Books Podcast, an interview with Mick Herron, the author of the Slough House series of spy novels.

Herron is originally from a working-class background in Newcastle but went on to study English at Oxford, where he still lives.

Described as the John le Carré of his generation, he has created the bestselling Slough House series which features a rogue’s gallery of spies who have screwed up or been stitched up and are as a consequence desk-bound – “less MI5, more 9 to 5”.

Presiding over them is the magnificently monstrous Jackson Lamb, a brutally insensitive, belching, boozing, Falstaffian figure who makes their lives a misery but ultimately has their backs.

The latest book in the series, Slow Country, is one of the best so far, tightly plotted, wittily written and as a bonus a pitiless portrait of Brexit Britain. Herron shares his views on the current political drama gripping the UK as well as his influences and writing methods.

Mick Herron, author of the Slough House series

Antony Farrell, of Lilliput Press, which this year celebrates its 35th anniversary, discusses his career in publishing, the history of the press and the “genius” authors with whom he has worked over the years, including Hubert Butler – “he was a secular saint to me” – Tim Robinson, John Moriarty and Desmond Hogan.

He talks about his background – his father was “a Castle Catholic”, his mother an Ulster Protestant and he was educated at Harrow public school, where he boxed (“I was more athlete than aesthete”) and was called “a bog rat”, inspiring him to embrace his roots, studying Irish history at Trinity College Dublin.

We also touch on Brexit and Boris Johnson, including James Shapiro’s witty advice to the British prime minister on how to approach his book on Shakespeare.

Farrell also discusses the pros and cons of being published by an Irish publisher rather than a British one, the importance of alliances and building long-term relationships with authors, the different challenges of publishing fiction and nonfiction, and the people he has worked with over the years, many of whom have gone on to establish high-profile careers in publishing, the arts and as authors.

Describing it as “a kind of finishing school”, he speaks of the 300 or so interns he has employed over the years, including Aideen Howard, Brendan Barrington, Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen, Tom Morris, Elske Rahill and Nicole Flattery.

He offers a sneak preview of major titles coming up: including – a podcast exclusive! – Stephen Rea’s memoir, A Life in Parts; A Letter marked Personal, a posthumous novel by JP Donleavy; and The Last Footman by Gillies Macbain, an Anglo-Irish memoir for which he has high hopes.

Anthony Farrell, founder of The Lilliput Press

It has been some year for Danielle McLaughlin. On Thursday, she won the 2019 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, whose £30,000 (€33,500) prize money makes it the world’s richest for a short story. Last March, she was awarded the $165,000 (€150,000) Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.

The former solicitor from Co Cork, who only took up writing seriously 10 years ago at the age of 40 when illness forced her to stop practicing law, spoke to me for The Irish Times Books podcast from London the morning after her latest success.

We talked about her winning story, A Partial List of the Saved, her debut collection, Dinosaurs on Other Planets, and the remarkable strength of the Irish short story tradition. Two of the other five writers on the shortlist were also Irish – Kevin Barry, a previous winner and like her a protégé of Declan Meade, publisher of the Stinging Fly, and Louise Kennedy – while Caoilinn Hughes, Wendy Erskine and Gerard McKeague made it six out of 18 on the longlist.

She also discusses her forthcoming debut novel, Retrospective, which will be published by John Murray in 2021. “It began back in 2012 in a writing workshop given by Nuala O’Connor at Waterford Writers Weekend. I can still remember the chalky feel of the prompt – a piece of broken crockery – in my hand. It’s set between Cork city and west Cork and the main character is a fortysomething woman whose past intrudes on her personal and professional life at the worst possible time in the guise of her dead friend’s son and his father.”

Danielle McLaughlin - A Partial List of the Saved

On the eve of this weekend’s Echoes festival in Dalkey, celebrating Maeve Binchy and Irish writing, its programmer, author Henrietta McKervey, and Maeve’s widower, Gordon Snell, join me to talk about the thinking behind the festival and the many ways in which Maeve’s memory is being kept alive.

The festival always has Maeve at its heart but each year it has a different theme. This year’s theme is Celebrating Community in Contemporary Writing in Ireland. Last year’s theme was “Maeve the quiet feminist”, a description she loved, says Gordon, as it was the first time anyone ever called her quiet.

McKervey discusses the highlights of this weekend’s festival as well as her experience of being the first winner of the Maeve Binchy UCD travel scholarship, including a hair-raising vist to Fastnet lighthouse.

Snell reveals how he loves to re-read his late wife’s work, which only confirms his admiration for her briliance as a storyteller: “her dialogue is so good it could be put straight on the stage”.

He reminisces about their cameo roles in film adaptations of Maeve’s work, usually in a restaurant or at a bar drinking cocktails served by Stephen Rea, but also in an episode of Fair City.

He also discusses how he manages to write without his former partner – Maeve once described them working together in their upstairs studio at their typewriters as like two pianists performing a duet.

As our interview takes place inThe Irish Times office, talk inevitably turns to Maeve’s distinguished career as a journalist here. Snell reveals that his favourite article by her is I Was A Winter Sport, about a calamitous ski trip, while McKervey expresses admiration for Bincy’s versatility as a writer, shifting in shade from reporting sensitively on the Zeebrugge ferry disaster to writing wittily about the British royal family.

Echoes runs from October 4th till 6th in Dalkey. For ddetails, visit the website

Remembering Maeve Binchy - with Henrietta McKervey and Gordon Snell

Welcome to The Irish Times Books Podcast. In this latest episode, Martin Doyle talk to The Irish Times’s two regular crime fiction reviewers, Declan Burke and Declan Hughes, both acclaimed crime writers themselves, about their favourite crime fiction of 2019. 

So get your pen and paper ready to take note of some excellent suggestions for your crime reading pleasure.

The best crime fiction of 2019

Books Editor Martin Doyle talks to Darran Anderson about his memoir of growing up in Troubles-torn Derry, Inventory: A River, A City, A Family.

They discuss the book's themes of family, history and memory, its inspiration found in the ideas of Georges Perec, and how it relates to his previous work, Imaginary Cities, an exploration of urban landscapes that never were, or that existed only on the page or on the screen.

Darran Anderson, author of Inventory

A reading of 'The Little Red Balloon', the winning entry in the 15-18 category of the Children's Short Story competition, by 17-year-old Emma Broderick, of Muckross Park College, Dublin.

The Little Red Balloon

The Books Podcast with Martin Doyle. Sponsored by Green & Blacks.

Popular tracks by The Irish Times Books Podcast