BELFAST based author Michael Magee has won the annual John McGahern Prize for his debut novel Close to Home.
The book, which tells the story of two working-class brothers in post-Troubles Northern Ireland, was described as having an “astonishing narrative energy” by the esteemed Irish author Colm Toibin, who selected the 2023 John McGahern Book Prize winner.
The prize adds to Magee’s already bulging mantlepiece, with the author having already won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction and the 2023 Waterstones Irish Book of the Year.
Now in its fifth year, the John McGahern Prize was established by the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool to promote new Irish fiction and to celebrate the memory of John McGahern (1934-2006), one of Ireland’s greatest masters of prose fiction.
The Prize, which is worth £5,000, has previously been awarded to Aingeala Flannery for The Amusements, to Louise Kennedy for The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, Hilary Fannin for The Weight of Love and Adrian Duncan for Love Notes from a German Building Site.
Magee, who is the fiction editor of the Tangerine and a graduate of the creative writing PhD programme at Queen’s University Belfast, will give a special reading of his book at the Liverpool Literary Festival on Saturday, October 5.
The event is free to attend but registration is required here.