Lisa McInerney's prize-winning novel 'The Glorious Heresies' inspired by Cork
AN honorary Cork woman, author Lisa McInerney is looking forward to taking part in Crosstown Drift at the Cork Midsummer Festival. It will see the author of City of Bohane and Beatlebone, Kevin Barry, introducing some of the finest writers based in Ireland today in some of Cork’s most intimate and unusual locations. Cork is where McInerney found her voice. And what a distinctive, edgy and streetwise voice that is. She has just won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, set in Cork where she spent many years. The prize is worth £30,000.
The Galway-born writer, who now lives in Gort with her husband and daughter, says that winning the prestigious prize “is very much a validating thing. In a literary context, it’s one of the bigger prizes and is open to books written by women in English all over the world. So it’s a great boost. It is giving me the profile that I would have liked to have built by maybe book four. To have it happen already is a massive step. I was up against people like Anne Enright, Elizabeth Strauss and Kate Atkinson.”
