Mayo author longlisted for the Booker Prize
Colin Barrett author of Wild Houses
An author from Mayo is the only Irish author to have been longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.
Colin Barrett, who was born in Canada but raised in Knockmore is one of 13 contenders for this year’s Booker Prize which is among the most prestigious awards in fiction and carries a prize of £50,000 for his debut novel Wild Houses, which was released in January of this year.
Booker judges called Wild Houses “a propulsive, darkly comic and superlatively written account of frustration and misadventure in a small Irish town”.
“With two collections behind him, Barrett is well established as a master both of the short story and the sentence; his debut novel confirms and extends all his promise.”
“The connections between the cast and the past tragedies that have forged them are expertly revealed in a slow-burn study of character and fate that’s also an edge-of-your-seat thriller,” they said.
Barrett’s debut short story collection Young Skins won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Calm With Horses, which was published as part of Young Skins, was later adapted into a film starring Barry Keoghan.
Barrett will be hoping to become the second Irish author in-a-row to claim the Booker Prize, which was awarded to Paul Lynch last year for Prophet Song. The final shortlist of six will be announced on September 16.
