Niall Williams's Time of the Child wins Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award
has won the 2025 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, worth €20,000, for Time of the Child at a ceremony on the opening night of the Listowel Literary Festival in Co Kerry.
This year's adjudicators, authors Carol Drinkwater and Paul McVeigh, reviewed more than 50 submitted novels before selecting the winner from a powerful shortlist that included Christine Dwyer Hickey, Joseph O'Connor, Colm Tóibín and Donal Ryan.
'Judging the prize this year was no small task,' McVeigh said. 'The quality of the entries was superb, a testament to an extraordinary time in Irish literature. Any of the shortlisted books could have won but, in the end, Time of the Child by Niall Williams rose to the top. I don't remember the last time I read a book that made me stop, so frequently, unable to continue until I had savoured a sentence. He is an extraordinary writer and a worthy winner of the Irish Novel of the Year.'
Drinkwater said: 'Niall's writing is so exciting. It is exquisite. Reading his sentences was like sitting in a magnificent cathedral and listening to a great soprano singing, notes reaching to the rafters and returning to me, to nestle in my heart. It is a novel full of compassion. The characters are so vulnerable, they tear you apart. It has been several weeks since we chose Niall's novel as our winner. Still, I sit at my desk and picture myself in that doctor's surgery. I hear the child crying; I can smell the newly washed nappies; I long for these people, that father and daughter, to be given the miracle they so crave.'
READ MORE
Reviewing it for The Irish Times, Sarah Gilmartin praised the lushness and lyricism of the language and called it 'a warm and life-affirming story about ordinary people going to extraordinary lengths.
'Set during the advent season of 1962 in the fictional village of Faha on the west coast of Ireland, the grimly familiar scenario of an abandoned baby becomes fresh again through the heroic acts of a local doctor and his eldest daughter, as depicted by a writer who has long been interested in the wonders of the everyday.'
Time of the Child is the 11th novel of the Dublin-born writer, who turns 67 next month, and his third set in the fictional village of Faha, west Clare. He has long lived in Kiltumper, Co Clare, with his wife Christine Breen. His 1997 debut novel, Four Letters of Love, has been made into a film starring Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne and Helena Bonham Carter. It will be released in July.
'I am the great unknown novelist,'
Williams told interviewer Roisin Ingle last October
, laughing. 'Even after being longlisted for the
Booker
,' his wife added, talking about Williams's first book set in Faha, History of the Rain, which was published in 2014.
'It took me a long time to have the confidence to write [about rural Clare] in fiction, after living it for years. Because Ireland has moved on and the intelligentsia in Ireland has really moved on. So, writing these stories, you were going to be viewed as sentimental, nostalgic ... or people would think it's not real.'
Whether real or not, it has certainly paid off.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Jung at Heart – Frank McNally on the Irish legacies of a Swiss psychologist
The psychologist Carl Jung, who was born 150 years ago this weekend, seems never to have visited Ireland. But he loomed large in the lives of two of our greatest writers, for very different reasons. He and James Joyce shared a city – Zurich – for a period during and after the first world war. Unfortunately, they also shared a deep, mutual scepticism, exacerbated by the attempts of third parties to bring them together. Here's Joyce, writing to his patron Harriet Weaver in 1921: 'A bunch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr Freud) amuses himself at the expense…of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.' One of that bunch was Elizabeth McCormack Rockefeller, a Jungian disciple and philanthropist who subsidised Joyce for a time, but wanted him to undergo analysis and suspended funding when he wouldn't. READ MORE Jung, for his part, believed Ulysses was evidence of the author's latent schizophrenia, which he also thought explained Joyce's heavy drinking. Asked to write the preface for a German edition, he suggested among other insults that the book could be as easily read backwards as forwards. When the publishers showed that to Joyce, according to biographer Richard Ellmann, he telegraphed back a terse response in German, 'Niedrigerhangen', meaning: 'Ridicule it by making it public' (yes, they have a word for that too). Jung later repented by publishing a more respectful version and, in a letter to Joyce, admitting that difficult as he found Ulysses to read, 'I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it.' As for the author, family tragedy eventually forced him to relent in his scepticism enough to allow Jung treat his daughter Lucia for the actual schizophrenia with which she was diagnosed in her mid-20s. 'I wouldn't go to him, but maybe he can help her,' he wrote. Jung thought Lucia had the same madness as her father, without the genius to channel it, and famously likened them to two people going to the bottom of a river: one diving and the other drowning. Ellmann thought Jung was fundamentally wrong about Joyce's supposed self-medication against mental illness, in part because of his unfamiliarity with Irish drinking habits. 'It was not easy for Jung, who had been brought up in a 'fanatical anti-alcoholic tradition', to understand Joyce, whose rearing was diametrically opposite,' he wrote. The writer drank at night only, Ellmann pointed out, and with a combination of 'purpose and relaxation'. He enjoyed company but also used it to study human behaviour and to unburden himself of anxieties. In summary: 'He engaged in excess with considerable prudence.' By contrast with Joyce, Samuel Beckett had only one encounter with Jung, but it brought a shattering insight that changed his life. When he attended a lecture by Jung in 1934, it was at the suggestion of his psychiatrist Wilfred Rupert Bion, who had been treating Beckett for depression. Some of that related to an intense relationship with his mother, an austere woman from whom he inherited his tall, thin frame and hawk-like features, but not her narrow worldview. Relations between them were exacerbated by Beckett's apparent prenatal memories of a claustrophobic life in the womb. In the lecture, Jung recalled the sad case of a pre-teenage girl he had treated years before. She was troubled by recurrent dreams, which the psychologist thought (but didn't say) were premonitions of imminent death. And she did indeed die soon afterwards. But the bit that astounded Beckett was Jung's one-line summary, added as an afterthought. For Beckett, that explained a lot about his own life. Bion thought so too and went on to develop theories involving 'psychological birth' in the womb, a result of which was that 'biological birth did not necessarily bring mental separation from the mother'. Beckett gave up therapy the same year. But he often referred to Jung's story in conversation. And a 20 years later, he put it in the mouth of Maddy Rooney, the main character in his radio play All That Fall (which I had the strange experience a while back of hearing at Tullow Church, Foxrock, in the Beckett family pew, among a blindfolded audience). All That Fall is the most localised of his works, set along Brighton Road on a race day in nearby Leopardstown. Mrs Rooney goes to meet her blind husband off the train, which we later learn has been the scene of a tragedy involving a child, never explained. On the way home, she remembers something she heard in a talk once, from 'one of those new mind doctors', that had 'haunted' her ever since. She goes on to retell the story Beckett had heard, about the 'strange and unhappy little girl' and recalls the doctor's conclusion, which he had found so mind-blowing: 'The trouble with her was that she had never been really born'.
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
Rare sighting of humpback whale in Donegal Bay caught on camera
Locals in Dungloe have nicknamed a local abandoned housing estate as "the Titanic", as it has been sinking since being completed in 2007. Video: Joe Dunne
The Irish Sun
6 hours ago
- The Irish Sun
Daniel O'Donnell and Daithi O Se go head-to-head and take hilarious digs on air ahead of All-Ireland final
THE two nicest men in Irish showbiz engaged in the softest trash talk in radio history today as Daniel O'Donnell and Daithi O Se traded a cupla focal ahead of the All-Ireland final. Soft spoken Donegal singer 2 Daithi is backing his home county to win in the All-Ireland final on Sunday Credit: Andres Poveda LTD 2 Daniel said he'll bring back the Sam to Donegal Credit: Not known, clear with picture desk The unlikely duo called in to the Oliver Callan Show on RTE Radio One as part of a segment building up to the big clash in Croke Park on Sunday. Wee Daniel fired the opening shot in the head to head as he boasted that the Sam Maguire trophy 'has the bag packed' and will be heading back to Donegal this weekend. The country music sensation will play a series of shows in Killarney's INEC next month and joked that he won't be able to show his face in Kerry if Donegal lose after all his bragging. He said: 'I have to go to the Kingdom at the end of August because we've shows in Killarney and I do not want to be introduced to Sam Maguire as a Kerry resident so it is all or nothing. read more on daithi o se 'I have to lay it down to Jim and the team for my sake if nobody else's they have to take Sam back to Donegal.' He joked: 'I might cancel the INEC.' Daithi said: 'They've a new song written now for Daniel when he comes down to Killarney to the INEC and it's called Jimmy's scratching a**es.' Most read in Celebrity The light hearted segment ended with Daniel O'Donnell hoping that the All-Ireland final lives up to the game with both teams leaving it all on the pitch. He said: 'All joking aside. My hope is that both teams come out and leave everything on the pitch in Croke Park and whoever wins that the other team is proud of what they did. Daniel O'Donnell sends fans wild 'I think if they both come out and play the way they can play it will be the game of all games and that's what I hope for now seriously. 'Whatever team has to go home without Sam that they are happy that they did their best.' Daithi slagged the sweet talking Donegal man and claimed: 'He'd talk a pig into a ham sandwich.'
