I’m over-the-moon that ‘I Hear You’ has sold out its initial print run. This is particularly great as short stories famously don’t sell well. So, thanks to everyone who bought a copy!
It looks the same with the addition of some new quotes from BBC Radio 4, Bookmunch, RTE, and The Irish Times.
You can pick up your copy here.
I join Wendy Erskine, Neil Hegarty, Oliver Jeffers, Eimear McBride and Babita Sharman in The Irish Times today – take a look.
Thank you to novelist Neil Hegarty, for this lovely review of, I Hear You, in the Irish Times.
“My mind found an old shoebox full of memories, and as I opened it, the moths of the past flew out”: in The Singer, one of the short stories in Paul McVeigh’s vivid and memorable new collection, we meet a nameless female protagonist as she sifts through the stuff of her life. The scene is an ordinary family home in north Belfast – but as each of these stories reminds us, there is no such thing as an ordinary family or home. Rather, each family, home, life is invariably extraordinary, in myriad ways – and all we need do to see this is to pay attention.
The Singer is a story of sibling rivalry, envy, tension – and to add further to such pleasures, this is also a complex retelling of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The protagonist’s sister (and indeed, her name is Jane) has always been the favourite one, the talented one, the one who triumphed at the local talent competition three years running – though also the one who even as a child liked to take nips from the bottle of cooking brandy in the kitchen cupboard. The other sister has gone off and earned a degree, has been good, has carved out a sensible place in the world – has been thoroughly eclipsed: but now she teeters on the edge of something remarkable, of a longed-for switch in life; and to add to her satisfaction, Jane has taken to calling from London, looking for money. There is sleekness in the telling, there is satisfaction in the glimpse of a happy ending – and best of all, this happy ending will not be for everyone.
The Singer is one element in The Circus, a sequence of linked stories that shows us a multifaceted society, and provides a much-needed corrective to the version of north Belfast glimpsed from time to time in the television news. Each story was originally written for radio, and this genesis explains the collection’s depth of colour and vividness of voice. And its variety: Paul McVeigh’s writing has demonstrated an ongoing commitment to working-class and queer representation, and this sustained energy flows through this collection, to illuminating effect – for this is a world of change, of openness, of the drunkenness of things being various.“
Read here.
Buy here.
Wow! The Irish Times has done an amazing job with ‘Daddy Christmas’ my Christmas Day short story commissioned by Michael Shannon for BBC Radio Ulster which aired nationally in BBC Radio 4. This is its first time in print thanks to Martin Doyle and Nadine O’Regan at The Irish Times and look at these beautiful illustrations/artworks by Anne O’Hara.
‘Daddy Christmas’ will appear in my collection of radio stories ‘I Hear You’ from Salt Publishing March 2025.
You can read the story here and you can see more about ‘I Hear You’ here.
I’m delighted that Big Man has been shortlisted for the audience choice prize at The Irish Times Theatre Awards. This one-man-show up against all those big productions with massive budgets from the best theatres and companies in the country.
I’m also over-the-moon that James McFettridge has been shortlisted for Best Lighting.
Thanks to all the team!
If you enjoyed the show you can vote here.
‘Queer Love’ Reviewed in The Irish Times
The Queer Love anthology ‘demonstrates why queer writers excel at writing’ according to poet/professor Sean Hewitt in The Irish Times.
Queer Love seeks to go some way to redress the lack of acknowledgement of the LGBTQI+ community in Irish literary anthologies, with a mixture of established writers of international standing, writers who have been making a splash in recent years and new emerging writers. The anthology has a mixture of previously published stories, newly commissioned work and those entered through our call out. Featuring stories by John Boyne, Emma Donoghue, Mary Dorcey, Neil Hegarty, James Hudson, Emer Lyons, Jamie O’Connell, Colm Tóibín, Declan Toohey, and Shannon Yee.
You can buy it here.
“Let’s fill those bookshelves in homes, libraries, and shops with more and more stories of us.” Click to read the article.
Thanks to Martin Doyle for spreading the word about the ‘Queer Love’ anthology by Southword Editons (Southword Literary Journal / Munster Literature Centre) edited by me. This is an extended version of the foreword with contributions from Shannon Yee and Neil Hegarty. Thanks to the other contributors to the anthology John Boyne, Emma Donoghue, Mary Dorcey, James Hudson, Emer Lyons, Jamie O’Connell, Colm Toibin & Declan Toohey.
To Garth Greenwell, the huge international success of his debut What Belongs to You, “was the biggest surprise of my life”, and he feels “immensely lucky” as “the success of a book has as much to do with chance as anything else”. Its success has allowed him to have a career as a writer and teacher in a way he wasn’t able to in his previous 20 years of writing. He feels relieved, though, that the writing process itself, “the struggle”, just him alone with his notebook and “the pit of doubt and despair”, hasn’t changed. “I wouldn’t know who I would be without it.”
You can read my interview with him about his new novel, Cleanness, in The Irish Times.
“Are you a new or emerging writer from a working class background? Would you like to be published alongside an Impac Award-winner, a Booker Prize-winner, two Sunday Times Short Story Award-winners, a senator, playwrights and poets? What about a professional development programme with the help of leading publishers and the Irish Writers Centre.”
Read all about it in my article in The Irish Times.
Here’s an excellent piece from Lisa Frank of Doire Press in Irish Times Culture on the new anthology we edited called ‘Belfast Stories’.
You can come to the launch at Belfast Book Festival this Sunday 5pm at Crescent Arts Centre.
Paul McVeigh 