Illustration: Lara Harwood/Heartagency.com

A new Irish literary boom: the post-crash stars of fiction

Dynamic, radical, often female … Irish fiction is flourishing. Gone is the conservative writing – all nostalgia and sexual repression – of the Celtic Tiger years. The writers of the new wave are original and bold

Justine Jordan

Saturday 17 October 2015

“Money kills the imagination,” says the narrator of Claire Kilroy’s 2012 novel The Devil I Know, a fiendishly good satire of the moment the Irish boom went bust. “It makes us want the same thing.” The book is set in 2016 and takes the form of one man’s testimony to a tribunal intended to uncover the sleaze and short-termism that enabled a giant property bubble to inflate in the years leading up to the global financial crash of 2008. In the autumn of 2015, we have not yet caught up with Kilroy’s future setting, but as the real-world aftershocks of the Celtic Tiger’s downfall continue, one Irish sector is booming: with the rise of a new wave of writers, from Paul Murray, Kevin Barry and Donal Ryan to first-time authors such as Eimear McBride, Sara Baume, Lisa McInerney and Colin Barrett, there is a palpable energy to Irish fiction.