The University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies is delighted to announce that the winner of the inaugural £5,000 John McGahern Annual Book Prize is Adrian Duncan, for his novel, Love Notes from a German Building Site. The Prize judges – University Vice-Chancellor Dame Professor Janet Beer; Chancellor and author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín; Professor of Irish literature in English, Frank Shovlin; and The Irish Times fiction reviewer, Sarah Gilmartin – praised the “pitch perfect debut” for its “spare, exact prose”, and how it reveals “what it might mean to be Irish in the 21st Century”. On learning of his success, Adrian Duncan said: “I am very moved and proud to be awarded this wonderful…

Welcome to our Oona virtual book tour! To start the week, we are delighted to present an extract from the book, Oona by Alice Lyons. Read on, or download the extract here – Oona_Extract Oona by Alice Lyons is available for Kindle, for Kobo and from bookshops. 18 In time back when she lived. When she smelled up the car, when her fingers drummed and fingered the fluted-like-pie-crust Buick  steering wheel. When she reached her arm instinctively, braced me in the bench seat beside her every time she hit the brakes in rainy streets. Her presence pulsing, fragrancing the space. Breathwarm car, car where we faced the same way: street signs, lights, suburban streets, Jersey sights…

Kevin Boyle played  a major role over many years in seeking a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Northern Ireland. One previously unknown initiative involved his effort, with fellow lawyer Francis Keenan, to use the European Commission on Human Rights as a mechanism to seek a negotiated solution to the 1981 IRA hunger strike. That effort is the subject of this excerpt from Are You With Me? Kevin Boyle and the Rise of the Human Rights Movement by former CNN correspondent Mike Chinoy. Kevin Boyle watched the hunger strike crisis with growing dismay.  Sympathetic to the predicament of the prisoners, and disgusted by what he and many others saw as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s intransigence,…