“Paul Lynch’s writing is full of dark invention and brutal beauty. A raw and audacious talent which grips Irish writing by the neck.”
Hugo Hamilton

“Everything about John the Revelator excited me – I couldn’t wait to turn the page and keep on going. It was like reading for the first time, almost as if I’d never read a novel before.”
Roddy Doyle

Chairperson: Steve Ellerhoff

Dublin Writers Festival brings together two emerging Irish novelists whose distinctive prose style and strong sense of place has marked them out as writers to watch.

John the Revelator, Peter Murphy’s “remarkable debut” (The Observer) about the frustrations of a provincial adolescence, was met with instant acclaim and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Fiction Award. A musician and long-time contributor to Hot Press, Murphy’s prose is celebrated for its lyricism and rhythmic power, and it’s fitting that the idea for his new novel came from an interview with the Manic Street Preachers. Shall We Gather at the River introduces Enoch O’Reilly, an Elvis impersonator and ‘radiovangelist’ in Murn, Co. Wexford, a small town threatened by a great flood. Mixing dark themes with surprising comic turns, Shall We Gather at the River is a compelling follow-up from an extraordinary talent.

Film critic Paul Lynch’s debut novel Red Sky in Morning has created quite a stir in the publishing world. Inspired by a horrific incident in Philadelphia in 1832 in which 57 Irish railroad workers were killed, the novel tells the story of Coll Coyle, who flees his home in Inishowen, Donegal after killing a man, and is pursued all the way to America, where a greater tragedy awaits. Written in a taut, lyrical prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy and set against the epic backdrops of Donegal and Pennsylvania, Red Sky in Morning marks the emergence of an exciting new talent.