The John McGahern Annual Book Prize

Join us for the annual John McGahern Book Prize and hear excerpts from the winning entry. This event is hosted by Professor Frank Shovlin.

Aingeala Flannery’s novel, The Amusements (Penguin), has been chosen by esteemed novelist Colm Tóibín as the winner of the John McGahern Prize for debut book of Irish fiction published in 2022. The McGahern Prize is just the latest success for The Amusements – earlier this year it was named the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2023 and has gained widespread acclaim amongst critics. Described as “Unputdownable . . . one of the best novels of the year” by The Sunday independent it is a luminous and unforgettable story about roads taken and not taken - and a brilliantly observed portrait of a small-town community. At the Liverpool Literary Festival, Aingeala will read from The Amusements and collect her £5,000 prize.

Aingeala Flannery is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. She has completed an MFA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin. Her short story 'Visiting Hours' was the winner of the 2019 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Competition. In 2020 and 2021, she was awarded a Literature Bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland. Her work has appeared in The Bath Anthology and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio One as part of the Francis MacManus Short Story Competition. She lives in Dublin.

Now in its fourth year, the Prize was established by the University's Institute of Irish Studies to promote new Irish fiction and to celebrate the memory of one of Ireland's greatest masters of prose fiction, John McGahern (1934-2006).

For information about the Prize and past winners, visit the Institute of Irish Studies webpages.