Show caption ‘There is such immense diversity of purpose’ … Sebastian Barry. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian Sebastian Barry Sebastian Barry named Irish fiction laureate, hailing ‘golden age of Irish prose’ Award-winning novelist succeeds Anne Enright in three-year role promoting Irish literature and its formidable generations of writers Alison Flood Thu 8 Feb 2018 12.25 GMT Share on Facebook

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The award-winning author Sebastian Barry has vowed to celebrate what he described as a “golden age of Irish prose writing” after being named the new laureate for Irish fiction.

Announced this morning by Irish president Michael D Higgins as the successor to current incumbent Anne Enright, Barry hailed the “fabulous generations” of authors writing in Ireland today, from the 26-year-old novelist Sally Rooney to the Booker winner Roddy Doyle, 59.

Being awarded the laureateship was “a joyous moment, after 40 years of work”, said Barry, who has won the Costa book of the year prize twice for his novels The Secret Scripture and Days Without End. “I am really happy to be the ambassador of this rather stupendous reality for a few years,” he added.

Barry said the current “golden age of Irish prose writing”, which has seen authors including Donal Ryan, Eimear McBride, Rob Doyle, Kevin Barry, Mike McCormack and Sara Baume come to the fore, was a relatively new phenomenon. “There are at least 20 people if not more who at the moment would be highly qualified to do this laureateship,” he said. “That hasn’t always been the case. When I was starting out in the 70s you had four or five and that was it.”

I hope the younger ones won’t mind me celebrating them. Of course, their proper instinct would be to poison my soup

Today, though, “there is such immense diversity of purpose and difference of styles. That is the great wealth of the present moment. There are writers who have worked the miracle of making their name in their 20s and others who have worked the concomitant miracle of working from book to book for decades.”

The strength of Irish writing, said Barry, was “bizarre”. “I don’t know how we’ve done it or why it happens – perhaps it’s being a lost cusp of Europe, in the rain, and part of it has stimulated us into this strange activity. As I go on I understand it less, but the less I understand about it the more important it seems to me.

“What I notice about it is it rises out of a very uncertain country, and the confidence of the writing is in measure and in balance to that. It has a particular sort of Irish confidence that is in opposition almost to what the country has been through in the past few years. That’s what I think characterises it. I’m quite overwhelmed sometimes by meeting a Sally Rooney or a Rob Doyle because they seem to me rather tremendous … there’s a formidable quality to the writing,” he said. “What unites them is the ability to generate the shock that rare work gives the reader, not only in the pleasure and gratitude it engenders, but the serious business of the lines and engines of your own life finding answer and echo in another’s art.”

‘Rather tremendous’ … from left, Sally Rooney, Rob Doyle and Eimear McBride. Composite: The Guardian

Barry’s three-year term as laureate, an initiative of the republic’s Arts Council, will run until 2021, and is intended to “acknowledge the contribution of fiction writers to Irish artistic and cultural life by honouring an established Irish writer of fiction, encouraging a new generation of writers, promoting Irish literature nationally and internationally and encouraging the public to engage with high quality Irish fiction”.



“I hope the younger ones won’t mind me celebrating them. Of course, their proper instinct would be to poison my soup and get rid of me,” said Barry.

He was chosen for the role by a selection panel chaired by the poet Paul Muldoon. The judges said in a statement. “With his soul-searching, heart-stopping prose Sebastian Barry takes Irish fiction where it hasn’t been before. With transcendent insight as well as a storyteller’s ingenuity he teaches us to see the world differently, and to look more deeply into our own hearts. This most lyrical of myth-makers magically rearranges our synapses.”

With his soul-searching, heart-stopping prose Sebastian Barry takes Irish fiction where it hasn't been before

Barry revealed that one strand of his laureateship would see him focusing on writers reading their own work. “I think it’s fascinating, while people are still around, to hear their voices, to hear them reading. For me it’s very thrilling, like hearing somebody sing – it’s a quick way to try and understand something about them that you can’t get otherwise. I was hoping to do a couple of events that show how thrilling it is to witness the bird song of the particular bird that the writer might be. I’m aiming for magic, so we’ll see how we do,” he said. “It’s something in the Irish tradition – they are books written on the air, they’re written down simply as an acquiescence to modernity but there’s a very oral quality to them.”

He also, he said, wanted to “acknowledge the part played by readers in the life of books – in many forms of course, the necessarily private, but also in the newer form of the book club, an activity that can work surely anywhere, even in prisons, in detention centres, in hospitals, places where a life might otherwise be temporarily circumscribed”.

He will also give a lecture each year, and will teach at University College Dublin and New York University.

Arts Council chair Sheila Pratschke called Barry “a writer of profound humanity and grace”, who she said has “produced a body of work that is testament to his passion for, and commitment to, literature and writing”.