Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, worth £5,000, previously won by fellow Belfast author Anna Burns for Milkman and Claire Keegan for Small Things Like These.
Their debut collection, it was published last year by Stinging Fly Press in Ireland and by Granta in Britain, and was also shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.
“I was gripped by this collection of stories in which the political past and political present are interwoven to produce an atmosphere charged with grief and meaning,” judge Scarlett Baron said. “I loved the daring of its wrought metaphors; its taut, pitch-perfect dialogue; its haunting attention to the power of silence and of things left unsaid. I especially admired the ways in which each individual story conjures a highly distinctive but often elusive voice, involving the reader in the attempt to make sense of each character’s personal and familial histories – histories which emerge as subtly political even when they are not outrightly, traumatically so.’
Kevin Power, revieiwng it in The Irish Times, wrote: “First, foremost: this is a brilliant and remarkable book, a collection of six short stories by a debut writer that immediately asks to be considered among this island’s signal 21st-century literary achievements.”
