Donal Ryan at the awards program for the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards. Image: APIBA
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
The An Post Irish ‘Book of the Year’ Award
As early cycles of many book and publishing awards programs open for 2025’s activity, others of course tend to conclude near year’s end. We continue to look back to late-year 2024 wins that news demands prevented us publishing at the time.
Today (January 24), we want to report the author Donal Ryan’s win of the An Irish Post Book of the Year honor, announced in late December. As you may recall, the An Post Irish program uses a vote to produce a six-title shortlist, from which a jury chooses the top winner, the “book of the year.”
The presentation of Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace—published by Penguin Random House / Doubleday and based in themes of “grief and the complexities of human emotions”—was made in a television special seen on RTÉ One on December 19.
Ryan is from Nenagh in County Tipperary, and his work reportedly has been published in more than 20 languages. His The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award; the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland; and the Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards in 2012.
It was also shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliot Prize, and was voted Irish Book of the Decade by the Dublin Book Festival. His fourth novel, ‘From a Low and Quiet Sea’, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018, and named the winner of the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature.
Ryan lectures in creative writing at the University of Limerick.
The An Post Irish Book Awards’ 2024 Shortlist
- Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan (Penguin Random House / Doubleday)
- Fia and the Last Snow Deer by Eilish Fisher, illustrated by Dermot Flynn (Penguin Random House Children’s / Puffin)
- Frankie by Graham Norton (Hachette / Coronet)
- A Stranger in the Family by Jane Casey (HarperFiction / Hemlock Press)
- Obsessed: The Autobiography by Johnny Sexton with Peter O’Reilly (Penguin / Sandycove)
- Nature Boy: A Journey of Birdsong and Belonging by Seán Ronayne (Hachette Books Ireland)
The 2024 jury for this prize program comprised Maria Dickenson (chair); Madeleine Keane; Cyril McGrane; Elaina Ryan; and Alex Clark.
More from Publishing Perspectives on book and publishing awards is here; more on the An Post Irish Book Awards is here; and more on the Irish market is here.