Twenty-First-Century Irish Prose

In 2018, while serving as the second Laureate for Irish Fiction, the author Sebastian Barry proclaimed, “We are in an unexpected golden age of Irish prose writing” (Barry 2018, cited under General Studies and Background). His announcement referred in part to a surfeit of new literary fiction by writers from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, including works by Anna Burns, Mike McCormack, and Sally Rooney, which has won widespread critical acclaim and prestigious literary prizes as well as commercial success. Scholarship relevant to many such writers and texts are cited in the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles “The Contemporary Irish Novel” and “The Irish Short Story.” However, the term “prose” also invites attention to other forms composed amid this “golden age” that have come to the fore but thus far received less critical attention. In 21st-century Ireland, nonfiction prose has flourished, derived in part from a rich tradition evident in the Oxford Bibliographies articles “Irish Travel Writing” and “Irish Life Writing.” This bibliography highlights in particular the essay as a prose form that has come to prominence in recent decades. The Irish writer Brian Dillon has emerged as an internationally influential practitioner and theorist of the essay, and collections from Emilie Pine, Emma Dabiri, and Rosaleen McDonagh have helped to expand representation in Irish writing. This entry also includes popular prose forms, among them varieties of genre fiction, young adult and children’s literature, and humor writing. As they have for centuries, Irish prose writers closely examine the natural world, though they now consider a world dramatically marked by climate change, and they assess contemporary conditions in Irish language prose, often turning attention to the transnational aspects of this tradition. In its form, content, and distribution, Irish prose also reflects the rising influence of digital media. One notable feature of much recent prose has been an activist impulse, as seen in projects that expose histories and experiences long hidden, and those that endeavor to assess and even intervene in contemporary sociopolitical movements, among them campaigns for same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, racial justice, and migrant rights. Finally, 21st-century Irish prose benefits from an array of literary magazines and independent publishers that make such work available in print and online to readers across the globe. The categories below reflect the generative overlap between the prose work as creative writing and the prose work as reference, so that a number of texts cited serve both as an example of 21st-century Irish prose as well as an important critical resource for understanding Irish prose.