Janitor wins her college’s literary prize

For the past 3 years, Caitriona Lally has worked as a janitor at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.

Last week, the college presented 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” that is “witty, subtle and occasionally endearingly unpredictable.”

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

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

Each morning, Lally 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 14-month-old daughter, Alice.

The day she got the call 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. Lally

Once Lally realized she had won the award — and that it came with a 10,000-euro (about $11,500) prize — she described it as “just pure magic.”

She 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.

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

After graduating in 2004, Lally worked as an English teacher in Japan for a year and traveled. She found herself unemployed in 2011, which was when she got the idea for the book.

“‘Eggshells’ is about a socially isolated misfit who walks around Dublin searching for patterns and meaning in graffiti or magicalsounding place names or small doors that could lead to another world,” Lally told The Washington Post.

She and her husband, who is employed by the government, live in Dublin.

Lally said her janitorial job works for her schedule as a mother and is a great fit for writing. She’s finishing a second novel — and not planning on giving up her morning work.

“It works well with my writing life. I’ve had paid copywriting jobs before, but it was hard to motivate myself to sit down at the computer and write my novel once my paid work was done,” she said.