The Top Irish Contemporary Authors You Should Know

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song was one of 2023’s breakout hits, taking home the coveted Booker Prize and numerous other critical accolades along the way. The story follows a mother of four as she contends with a dystopian depiction of Ireland which has come under a tyrannical reign. The Financial Times' Lucy Popescu called it "a powerful account of the reasons people flee their homes... [and] a compassionate, propulsive and timely novel that forces the reader to imagine — what if this was me?"

Nolan first broke out with her blistering debut, Acts of Desperation – an excruciating depiction of toxic love. In February, she released her follow up act. In Ordinary Human Failings, a child is found dead on a London estate and the tight-knit neighborhood suspects a family of Irish immigrants of being behind it. But the power of the novel relies less on suspense and more on, as CrimeReads’ Molly Odinitz wrote, it’s “visceral, knowing exploration of human misery and the ways we fail ourselves.”

Another contender for last year's Booker Prize, Dubliner Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting places us in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and introduces us to a cast of family members each battling with their own personal and familial crises in perhaps less than perfect ways. The book melds economic hardship, familial conflict, and dark humor into, as TIME's Cady Lang wrote, "an arresting portrait of a family that can't catch a break."

Louise Kennedy grew up in a Catholic family in the Belfast area of Northern Ireland at the height of the “Troubles.” Her Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlisted 2022 debut novel, Trespasses, reflects the violence that color her memories of that period. Amidst the carnage, the story follows a young Catholic primary school teacher who begins an affair with a much older Protestant barrister. Writing for The New York Times, J. Courtney Sullivan called it “brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.”

Claire Keegan’s short stories and novellas have taken the literary world by storm. Her 2021 book, Small Things Like These, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is now being adapted as a film, starring Oscar winner, Cillian Murphy. Her most recent collection, So Late in the Day, probes at the bewildering and often sinister power dynamics between men and women. The SF Chronicle’s Joan Frank says that reading “Keegan is like succumbing to a drug: eerie, hallucinogenic, time-stopping.”

Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a finalist for a Lambda Award, poet and critic, Seán Hewitt’s debut memoir was released to rapturous acclaim for its unshaking and piercing rumination on love, relationships, mental illness, and his own queer identity. Writing for The Atlantic, Alexander Chee, said it features “some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in years.”

There may be no bigger name in contemporary Irish popular literature than Sally Rooney. Her previous works, which include the Booker Prize nominated Normal People, were well received by critics and readers alike, and we hear murmurings that her upcoming Intermezzo will be a stunner. Unlike her previous tales, this story follows two brothers, on seemingly different life paths, as they wrestle with their relationship to each other, and to the people they love amidst a period of grief and despair.

Renowned for his raw depiction of working class Dubliners, the prolific Booker Prize winner, Roddy Doyle is not exactly an up and coming voice in Irish literature. But his latest novel, Love, which is about two middle-aged former drinking buddies reconnecting over pints after many years apart was too apt to not include. The Boston Globe’s Joseph Peschel succinctly says, “It’s about love and the remembrance of love between friends, lovers, and family.” Plus, it has an amazing cover.

The “First Lady of Irish Crime’s" latest release is the sequel to her 2021 novel The Searched. The story again follows a former Chicago cop, named Cal, who has entered an early retirement in rural Ireland, and started a new life with a local single mother and her teenage child, Trey. One day Trey's father reappears in the town with an English millionaire at his side and a plot to find gold in the area, upsetting the new family’s newfound peace.

Northern Ireland's Maggie O’Farrell won both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 2020 novel, Hamnet – a fictional account of the life of Shakespeare’s son who died in adolescence. Her subsequent novel, The Marriage Portrait, returns to the same period but takes us instead to Renaissance Italy, where we follow the daughter of a grand duke, who is unexpectedly thrust into a position of importance after her elder sister dies just before her wedding.