The Irish author Kevin Barry has won the Goldsmiths Prize, run in association with the New Statesman, for his second novel, Beatlebone – a wild, discursive trip around the west coast of Ireland and into the mind of John Lennon. Barry was awarded the £10,000 prize for fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form” in a ceremony at Foyles Charing Cross Road, London, this evening.
Born in Limerick in 1969, Barry lived in Cork, Liverpool, London, upstate New York, Barcelona and Santa Barbara, before settling in Sligo in the west of Ireland. His first short story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, was published by the small Irish press Stinging Fly in 2007 and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His first novel, City of Bohane (2011), set in a violent, wild west-style Cork in 2053, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was followed by another story collection, Dark Lies the Island (2012).
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