Success for Galway at Book Awards event

Galway shone at the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards, held virtually on Tuesday night and broadcast on the RTÉ website.

The Irish Language Book of the Year award was won by an Spidéal writer Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin for Madame Lazare, while Kennys in Galway City won the inaugural Best Bookshop Award and Deirdre Sullivan from Knocknacarra in the city, won Short Story of the Year for Little Lives.

This annual ceremony has been running since 2006 and is the country’s biggest literary awards event, with 20 prizes across 20 categories.

The new bookshop award was introduced to acknowledge the role played by bookshops countrywide in helping local communities to find the books they wanted during Covid-19. Kennys celebrated the win by offering their online subscribers an extra 10 per cent off all titles for a 24-hour period.

There were celebrations too in an Spidéal, where Barzazz, the new company that published Madame Lazare, is based.

It’s an imprint of Futa Fata, the successful Irish-language publisher specialising in children’s books that was established in the early 2000s. Barzazz was launched just this summer to publish contemporary fiction, poetry and translations for adults in Irish, and Madame Lazare was its first book – it’s also the debut novel from screenwriter, children’s author and songwriter, Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin.

A novel about secrets and truths, it follows the life of the mysterious Hana Lazare, with the action moving backwards and forwards in time between the Irish-speaking West of Ireland of the 1930s, to a devout Jewish community in 1990s Paris, to present day Brussels.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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