Author Ryan wins top literature prize

The Nenagh born author Donal Ryan has revealed that he has completed yet another novel, on a week he was acclaimed the world over as the first Irish winner of the prestigious Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature.

Ryan, who went to primary school in Youghalarra and secondary in Nenagh CBS, won the award for his fifth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea which has earned him international praise.

Of the new novel due to be published in August next year, Ryan said: “It’s provisionally called The Queen of Dirt Island, but it has had a few titles already so that could change, you never know.”

The writer says it is “a kind of follow-up” to his most recent book, Strange Flowers, and says he is “quite happy” with the way it has turned out. It is now in the final editing stages.

But for now the Nenagh man must be basking in the glow of being the first Irish writer to win the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature, especially following the worldwide praise that such a magnificent achievment has sparked.

The President of the Jean Monnet Prize’s jury, writer Gérard de Cortanze, said he wanted to “honour a young author who is considered one of the great discoveries of Irish and world literature”.

He compared Ryan, 45, to William Faulkner and John McGahern and referred to “pages of intense lyricism” and “powerful and inhabited literature”.

LOCAL TRIBUTES

Many organisations and people have paid tribute and congratulated Ryan on his achievement, including the University of Limerick where he lectures in creative writing as well as John Ryan, the proprietor of Nenagh Bookshop and the organisers of the Dromineer Nenagh Literary Festival who took to social media to issue a message of “massive congratulations”.

In an interview on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland after the announcement of his win, Ryan said it was a fantastic feeling to have his work recognised and winning such an award meant “an awful lot” to him.

He paid tribute to his French translater of A Low and Quiet Sea, Marie Hermet, who he said had done an “amazing job”, adding that translating his book in to French must have been “a difficult job”. “To take books like mine that are very heavy in demotic langauge and the vernacular, it [translating] must be an almost impossible task, so really I have to give Marie as much credit as myself.”

Ryan described Marie Hermet as a very intuitive and instinctive translator.

“She seems to just get the books very very quickly, but it can be a quite intimate process; you have to get deeply into the text and I think you have to be a very good writer to be a translator because you almost have to rewrite a book, and I think when it comes to very specific vernacular, as there is in my books, you almost have to re-cast the characters to a context that will be familiar to readers in your own country.”

ARRA MOUNTAINS

The author said the Danish translator of his books actually visited the Nenagh area “as she wanted to see the Arra Mountains and Tountinna because she had translated four of my books and I think the Arra Mountains and Tountinna and the Silvermines are mentioned so often she wanted to hear the North Tipperary dialect in her own ears just to get a real feel for it.”

Of the book that has won him the prize, Ryan said: “I set out to write a book about manhood when I sat down to write A Lone and Quiet Sea and the three main characters are each as important to me as the other. But every book you write is quite personal and it was a book that was at times a difficult process to write.

“I think it took me longer than all of my other novels to write because I was so intent on getting it as right as I could, or making it feel as right as I could, because I think it is important to strike a note that will resonate and will ring familiar to people because you want people to be moved by what you write. So it’s important to work as hard as you can to make sure it feels right.”

Asked if he had a favourite among his books, Ryan said: “ [It’s] The Thing About December because it’s the first novel that I finished. They say they are all personal but that’s a book I wrote for my wife because I never thought I’d be published and I wrote it just for her - to impress here really - and it’s a book she really loves, and because she really loves it it’s my favourite.”