Happy ending as Irish writer Ryan wins top book award
ACCLAIMED author Donal Ryan has become the first Irish winner of the prestigious Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature.
He won the award for his fifth novel, From A Low And Quiet Sea, which received international acclaim. Ryan weaved the stories of a Syrian refugee, a brokenhearted carer and a dubious moneyman in his latest work.
The president of the Jean Monnet Prize’s jury, writer Gérard de Cortanze, said he wanted to ‘honour a young author who is considered one of the great discoveries of Irish and world literature’.
He compared Ryan, 45, to William Faulkner and John McGahern and saluted ‘pages of intense lyricism’ and ‘powerful and inhabited literature’.
The writer’s wife Anne Marie Ryan congratulated her husband on social media, along with his translator, publisher and the University of Limerick – where he lectures in creative writing – with RTÉ broadcaster Rick O’Shea adding to the praise.
Ryan, born in Tipperary, previously said that without meeting his wife he would ‘still be messing around, getting to page ten, forgetting about it’.
He will receive his award during the European Literature Festival on November 20.
Ryan’s first novel The Spinning Heart, set around the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2013 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
His work was not always so highly regarded, with rejection after rejection from book publishers for his first two novels. Ryan kept each rejection letter, having joked that he loves to ‘wallow’ in his failures.
Despite his success when his first two books were published, Ryan went back to his job in the civil service in 2017. He said: ‘I’m a total chicken. It would not be like me to take any risk at all... I couldn’t risk not being able to provide for my family.’