Asking for a laptop as she lay in a hospital bed during a frightening cancer ordeal, Wicklow woman Elaine Murphy could hardly have imagined that those first taps on the keyboard would lead to her debut work of fiction, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, a Garden County mystery born from the darkest chapter of her life.
The album that emerged is a series of vignettes about the men in Breedlove's life, living and dead, beloved and infuriating. It spans the AIDS crisis, chosen family, knife collections, and a complicated inheritance of grief that Breedlove transforms, as he always has, into something that makes people laugh and cry at the same time.
Helen DeWitt's refusal of the Windham-Campbell prize highlights the tension between artistic integrity and the demands of self-promotion in the literary world.
Out of the many hundreds of titles that our organization carefully considered this year, these singular and striking finalists rose to the top, NBCC President Adam Dalva said in a statement Tuesday. They interrogate the lives we lead, broaden our creative and social horizons, move us, and continually surprise us. Especially in this difficult time, every one of these writers and translators deserves to be celebrated - and to be widely read.