'Relieved, elated – and maybe a bit proud': Roddy Doyle on chairing the Booker Prize panel
The Dublin author is the first winner of the prize to chair the panel. Doyle won the prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a novel about a ten-year-old boy living in north Dublin and the events that happen around his age group, school, and home.
The 'Booker Dozen' of 13 books feature no Irish authors, but has British, American, Canadian-Ukrainian, Trinidadian, Indian, Hungarian-British, Malaysian, and Albanian-American authors listed.
The longlist has been described as containing works that encapsulate 'a vast range of global experiences'.
Among the authors on the longlist are one previous winner of the prize, a third-time longlisted author, two authors previously shortlisted, two debut novelists, the first novel from an opera librettist and the twelfth from a former professional basketball player, a book that first gained acclaim as a short story, and one that is the first in a proposed quartet.
Doyle described the novels as 'alive with great characters and narrative surprises' which 'examine the past and poke at our shaky present'.
Advertisement
He is joined on the judging panel by Booker Prize-longlisted author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; actress, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid.
Of Doyle's experience chairing the judging panel and narrowing down the submissions to the longlist, he wrote, 'it wasn't easy; at times, it was agony'.
'Seven months, 153 books – the five judges have met and decided on the 13 novels that make up the 2025 Booker longlist.' He said there were so many excellent books among the contenders that saying goodbye to some of them 'felt personal, almost cruel'.
'But I loved every minute of the experience, and being in the company of my fellow judges,' he said. 'There was a small, discreet UN peace-keeping force close at hand, but it wasn't needed. My four colleagues are a generous, funny group but what was clear from the outset was that these are people who love – actually, who need – great books.'
He remarked on the list of locations featured amongst the novels.
'There are novels that experiment with form and others that do so less obviously… All, somehow, examine identity, individual or national, and all, I think, are gripping and excellent.
'As I write this, I have the 13 longlisted novels on my desk, in a pile. My phone tells me that one meaning of 'pile' is 'a heap of things'. It's a wonderful heap – I don't think I've seen a better one. At the end of our last, very long meeting, when we'd added the final book to the heap, we all felt relieved, elated – and maybe a bit proud.'
The full longlist:
Love Forms – Claire Adam
The South – Tash Aw
Universality – Natasha Brown
One Boat – Jonathan Buckley
Flashlight – Susan Choi
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny – Kiran Desai
Audition – Katie Kitamura
The Rest of Our Lives – Ben Markovits
The Land in Winter – Andrew Miller
Endling – Maria Reva
Flesh – David Szalay
Seascraper – Benjamin Wood
Misinterpretation – Ledia Xhoga
Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone...
A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article.
Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation.
Learn More
Support The Journal
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sunday World
an hour ago
- Sunday World
Summer of music in full flow as 30,000 revellers make pilgrimage to All Together Now 2025
It all comes together at Waterford Festival Recently crowned Ireland's Music Festival of the Year, the sixth annual event at Curraghmore Estate in Co Waterford sold out months in advance thanks to a stacked roster of musicians, DJs, comedians, artists, and even chefs. Summer An estimated 30,000 revellers have made their pilgrimage to the Déise since gates officially opened on Thursday afternoon — and it's easy to see why All Together Now is a summer staple for people all around the country. Shauna Lindsay and pals arrive in style The fun kicked off early on Thursday evening with some live sets to get the party started before most attendees arrived on site on Friday in a sea of Doc Martens and cowboy hats. With more than 20 stages to visit and over 400 performers to catch this year, it's a labyrinth of immersive experiences, but it's clear that Irish talent is the festival's keystone. Friday night saw Grammy nominees Fontaines D.C. draw thousands to the main stage fresh from their acclaimed Glastonbury performance last month. Their explosive set featured hits from their 2024 album Romance — highlights include encore songs In The Modern World and Starbuster — as well as older tunes from earlier albums Skinty Fia and Dogrel. And on Saturday evening, CMAT made her grand return to All Together Now after playing the festival in 2022. Like Fontaines D.C., she also played Glastonbury and Primavera in recent weeks on her festival tour, so was pretty warmed up by the time she hit the stage in Waterford. The 29-year-old pulled out all the stops for the droves of fans, belting out her latest single Euro-Country and teasing her upcoming album of the same name. We've also seen a stellar billing at the Jameson Connects: The Circle Stage, with dozens of artists from the Emerald Isle and beyond stepping out to showcase their talents at their captivating stage nestled beneath a canopy of trees. Music fans Donal and Meghan McDonald The energy has been infectious there across the weekend thanks to the likes of Birmingham-based rapper Kofi Stone and Belfast punk band Enola Gay, while Galwegian DJ Shampain kept the vibes going after hours with some ambient electronic tracks. But before the curtain closes on another year, we still get to hear from dancehall icon Sister Nancy, who was also recently revealed as this year's surprise secret guest at The Circle stage. She joins a stacked Sunday line-up featuring standout sets from Maria Somerville, David Holmes, Sloucho, and Curtisy. In between the jam-packed schedule of exciting musicians, there's been ample opportunity to get some R&R in the form of sauna yurt and hot tub experiences to yoga classes and meditation sessions. Survival However, most people appear to have opted for the fuss-free festival survival method of knocking back a Dioralyte and slouching back into their camp chairs as they get pumped for the final night of All Together Now 2025. And to top things off, Canadian superstar Nelly Furtado — ready to rock another Irish festival after an unforgettable set at Forbidden Fruit last summer — is bound to be one of the most memorable performances of the weekend. Here's hoping the rain stays off when she graces us with chart-topping hits Maneater and Promiscuous because the ponchos have (thankfully) been banished to the bottom of rucksacks so far. Music fans Michelle Connaughton and Lisa Coghlan News in 90 Seconds - Sunday, August 3rd
RTÉ News
an hour ago
- RTÉ News
Live, Forever: Why bands are reuniting early and often
It's less than two weeks until the Gallagher brothers take to the Croke Park stage as part of the Irish leg of their long-awaited reunion tour – but they're not the only ones on the comeback trail. In the past three years alone we've had Pulp and Blur reunite, as well as Sugababes, JLS, S Club, Blink 182, Busted, My Chemical Romance and Five – which have two shows coming up in the 3Arena later this year. Obviously, reunion tours are nothing new – they've been a feature of the live music scene in one way or another for decades. But the nature – and frequency – of the reunion gig has changed dramatically in a short space of time. In the past a group might have hit the road again as a last hurrah – looking to take the opportunity to pad out the pension fund while they were still able to manage a gruelling tour schedule. And they were less common, too, or incomplete due to band members opting out or passing away before they reached 'farewell tour' age. Nowadays, though, groups seem to be reuniting at a much earlier age. And, far from being seen as a cynical cash-grab, audiences are crying out for a chance to see these comeback kids. Why is this happening? It goes without saying that the artists are, first and foremost, getting back together for the love of the music… their art is what motivates them more than anything else. But it's not being too cynical to point out that there's also an often significant financial incentive to them hitting the road at an earlier stage in their band history. To better explain that, it's worth going back a few decades – and looking at how bands and musicians would have made their money in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Back then making money in the industry was really all about the physical music – single and album sales where what you were trying to drum up. The tour was maybe an add-on – but it wasn't the main event. In fact some cases artists would have made little or no money from their tour, but did so because gigging was a good way to drum up physical sales. The beauty in this model was that, even if you were a band who fizzled out after the first few albums – or gave up touring altogether, you would probably continue to enjoy decent revenues from sales well in to the future. Because you would have new generations of audiences finding your albums years later, And if you needed to boost your bank balance a little you could always push out a special edition, or a 10th or 20th anniversary collectable with a crappy demo bonus track added on, which would sell well on reputation alone. But of course that's all changed now thanks to streaming. Most people don't spend very much money on physical music nowadays. And of the money they do spend on accessing recorded music, very little of it makes its way to the artists. Even acts that are drumming up millions of streams are getting really paltry sums of money from Spotify and Apple Music. That means that touring – as well as merchandise - is now where you go if you want to have any hope of making money as an artist. A report by the Irish Music Rights Organisation last month said that the music industry contributes €1 billion to the Irish economy each year - and €786m of that comes from live events (though it's worth nothing that that spend would include what gig-goers drop on travel, accommodation, food and drink and possibly merch too). The report said consumers spend an average of 1,000 a year on music – and €757 of that goes towards live music. So you can take from that that the vast majority of money that's up for grabs for artists is available to them on the road. And people having money to spend is an important factor in all of this. Because the people who were listening to Five or the Sugababes or My Chemical Romance as tweens and teens are now maybe in their 30s – and there's a good chance they have a bit more disposable income now than they did the first time around. They will be far more willing, and able, to spend a few hundred euro on gigs each year. That means the acts that were popular with young people in the 1990s and 2000s have an opportunity to cash in on that fanbase in a way that wasn't possible when they were at the peak of their popularity. It's suddenly much easier for them to convince their fans to pay through the nose for concert tickets, and still pay €50 for a t-shirt or a poster while they're there. So in a lot of ways the economics of music have been flipped – bands used to tour to promote an album, now they might put out an album to drum up hype for a tour. Although in a lot of cases these reunited bands don't even put new music out... True; and Oasis is the perfect example of that. There's been absolutely no suggestion that they're going to go back into the studio, and it's fair to say that the fans don't care about that. All they want is for the band to finish the tour that they've announced – and ideally add a few more dates on down the line. Now maybe that's because the latter part of Oasis' back catalogue wasn't exactly their best work (those who disagree just need to look at the setlist for the reunion tour to see that Noel and Liam feel the same). However the fact that there's little demand for new music also points to some of the other reasons why these kinds of reunion tours are in such strong demand at the moment. Specifically in the case of Oasis, there's obviously a supply and demand factor. People haven't been able to see them play live together in at least 16 years, so there's a massive pent up demand. Had they stayed on good terms through the years and done a tour every year or two, they might not have seen such a clamour for tickets this time around. That being said, acts like Five, Pulp and Blur have done reunion tours before and are still seeing demand this time around - so having a keen audience is not just about laying low for a few years and then coming back. So what's creating such strong demand for these reunions? The pandemic can take part of the blame – it really super-charged people's FOMO, because people missed out really on a couple of years of gig-going. And now they want to make up for lost time, and mark some acts off their bucket lists. Perhaps another factor is the fact that we're living in a more nostalgic time than has ever been the case before – in part because streaming TV and music has put so much older content at our fingertips. Our smartphones are also, constantly generating photo albums of things we did just a few years ago – which encourages us to get wistful about our younger days which – in turn – makes us pine for the music we listened to at the time. At the same time that instant access to older content has made it much easier for younger people to discover and create a love for music that they were maybe a little bit too young for the first time around. There will no doubt be plenty of people in their late teens and early 20s at the Oasis concerts this month – alongside those who were grown-ups when they first heard Wonderwall. (In fact the demand for tickets from newer fans did spark a brief, nasty debate online which saw some older fans argue that they deserved tickets more than the newcomers (and, particularly, the younger women who wanted to go). So just how lucrative are these kinds of reunion tours? Well it obviously all depends – and there are a lot of factors at play. But it's likely that Oasis will be behind the year's biggest reunion, in financial terms if nothing else. It's estimated that they could be looking at revenues of more than €460m for their current tour – even assuming it is not extended beyond its current 41 date run. Now that is revenue for the whole tour –from that they'll need to cover a lot of costs including venue hire, staging, crewing, transport and so on. However it seems as though there will still be plenty left for the talent when all the bills are covered. The reports are that each of the Gallagher brothers could be walking away with upwards of €50m each – with even more potential income from merch and the inevitable boost to album sales/streams. For other bands it's probably not quite as lucrative – but all the same you'd imagine they could be building up a decent sum of money for themselves To take the example of Five– while they're not playing the same sized venues as Oasis, they are doing 25 nights in venues that are in the 10,000 to 15,000 seater range. Many of those nights are already sold out – or close to being sold out. So even if it's not tens of millions each, you would imagine there is a significant amount of money being generated for the group from their tour.
Irish Independent
3 hours ago
- Irish Independent
CMAT at All Together Now: Singer performs politically charged single name-checking ‘All the Berties'
The song is particularly poignant given its political context: 'it's about the financial crash and the fallout the country is still feeling the marks of today. 'I don't think of myself as a political songwriter, ' Thompson said to the thousands of festival attendees gathered in front of the main stage, but there are things the artist stands for, and she's not afraid to champion them. On the 'agenda' for the evening: trans rights (with a t-shirt on sale that will have its proceeds donated to Teni) and 'as always, Free Palestine' as she led the crowd into 'free free Palestine' chants. But the debut of Euro-Country is no afterthought. The performance came on the same day that Bertie Ahern emerged as the preferred Fianna Fáil candidate in the presidential election in November. The Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll showed 12pc of people believe that the former Taoiseach should be a contender to replace Michael D Higgins in the Áras. 'I'm so sorry that this has struck a chord with so many of you,' the Dunboyne native said to a heaving main stage crowd. She launched into the song, which includes lyrics that reference the former Taoiseach: 'All the big boys/ All the Berties/ All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me/I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me.' There were more cases of suicide during the bust period, according to the National Suicide Research Foundation, who cite 476 more male suicides than had there not been a recession. Thompson also makes a call back to the lack of public infrastructure and perpetual struggle with access to housing among those in their twenties and thirties: 'And it was normal/Building houses/They stay empty even now.' 'Nobody I grew up with basically lives here anymore, everyone has had to emigrate. Nobody can afford to live here, everybody is leaving home. And everyone who is left behind is left with less and less public services, healthcare and security in everything that you need to live a life not in danger,' said Thompson. 'I believe this is directly the fault of the Irish government that we had 20 - 25 years ago. And I can't explain to you the politic [sic] of what happened back then, I can only explain to you my memories of growing up as a kid during the crash that we all experienced, and it was a horrible, horrible time for the entire country.' 'I believe that people in their 20s and 30s have been really adversely affected by it. And the personal, emotional effects of it are something that I am interested in as a songwriter, because I think that we can learn from it.' 'All of that is to say, we've never performed this song live before, and I wanted to debut it here because I thought it was important.' When all was said and done, there was one more track to enjoy. 'I was wondering if after all that trauma you wouldn't mind doing me one more favour' she quipped, as she introduced Stay For Something, and gave the audience a melody to sing back. The crowd dutifully channelled a shared grief into a stirring rendition before lights out.
