This Irish janitor no longer on ‘Eggshells’

School staffer wins a top literary prize

Trinity College Dublin recently presented Caitriona Lally with the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, one of Ireland’s most prestigious literary honors. The prize committee praised her book, “Eggshells,” as “a work of impressive imaginative reach, witty, subtle and occasionally endearingly unpredictable.”

For the past 31⁄2 years, Lally has worked as a janitor at the college.

The day the call from the prize committee, Lally was so shocked she asked the person who told her she had won the award to please explain it again.

The award is given annually by Trinity College to a writer under 40 who shows great talent and “exceptional promise.”

“But at that moment, I couldn’t figure out what a Rooney was,” Lally, 39, said in an email, adding that her book had been published three years ago.

Lally called the “the happiest shock life.”

Each morning she wakes at 4:45 a.m., pulls on her blue janitor’s smock and heads for the college to clean from 6 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Then she returns home to take care of her 14month-old daughter, Alice. The day she got the call over the summer informing her she had won, Alice was being fussy.

“I’d been having a rough day — up early for my cleaning job, tearing home to mind the baby, baby wouldn’t nap and was making her feelings known,” Lally told Trinity College.

Once Lally realized she had won the award — and $11,500 — she described it as “pure magic.”

Lally had not applied for the award; the prize committee selects the nominees. Winners over the years have become some of Ireland’s best-known writers, came honor of my including Anne Enright and Frank McGuinness.

The benefactor of the prize is Peter Rooney, who took over from his uncle, Dan Rooney, former U.S. ambassador to Ireland and chairman of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who died last year.

Lally said she plans to use the prize money to pay her bills and provide day care for her daughter, as well as buy a water tank for her attic.

“I’d rather say I’m bathing in Dom Pérignon and flying first class to Las Vegas, but practicalities take priority,” she said by email.

The author’s path to literary acclaim has been marked by plenty of rejection and job hopping.

Lally attended Trinity College Dublin as an undergraduate student and studied English. To offset expenses, she worked as a custodian for the college while she was a student.

“I spent a couple of summers working as a cleaner in Trinity,” she wrote to The Post. “I spring-cleaned student residences after they vacated them, then worked as a chambermaid when guests came to stay in the college in the summer months. The spring cleaning was tough work - a year’s worth of grime doesn’t shift easily!”

She became close friends with some of the other housekeepers and said she enjoyed her college experience studying literature.

After graduating in 2004, Lally worked as an English teacher in Japan for a year and then traveled a lot. Back in Ireland, she held various jobs, including as a copywriter, and she went to New York for a time as a home helper. She found herself unemployed in 2011, which was when she got the idea for “Eggshells.”

It’s “about a socially isolated misfit who walks around Dublin searching for patterns and meaning in graffiti or magical-sounding place names or small doors that could lead to another world,” she wrote to the Washington Post.