There was double success for Mayo at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2021 this week.
Castlebar native Sally Rooney picked up the award for Novel of the Year at the awards for her third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You - the follow-up to the acclaimed best seller Normal People which previously also won the award.
Beautiful World, Where Are You tells the story of Alice, a novelist, who meets Felix, a warehouse employee, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Aghamore's Tadgh Mac Dhonnagain, won Irish Language Book of the year for his first novel Madame Lazare, which is a compelling story that follows the life of the mysterious Hana Lazare. The novel moves back and forward and back again in time between the Irish-speaking west coast of Ireland of the 1930s, to a devout Jewish community in 1990s Paris, to present day Brussels, as the old woman’s granddaughter, Levana, tries to discover who her grandmother really is and Hana struggles in vain to keep her secret.
It is the first novel by screenwriter, children’s author and songwriter, Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin. Speaking of the award, Mac Dhonnagáin said that he was delighted to receive recognition, not just for himself as a writer but also for the meitheal who helped him bring it to print: editors Máíre Zepf, Róisín Adams and Róise Nic Dhonnagáin and the Futa Fata/Barzaz core team, Breda Ní Chonghaile and Gemma Breathnach.
