Public vote to decide winners of book prize

THE choice of short-listed titles for this year’s Irish Book Awards features an extraordinary mix of authors and the outcome should be extraordinary too, because, for the first time, the public can vote for their favourite books.

Successful Irish writers like Seamus Heaney, Sebastian Barry, Maeve Binchy and Cecilia Ahern are clashing with famous names from the world of entertainment and sport such as Rachel Allen, Kathryn Thomas, Ross O’Carroll Kelly and Ronan O’Gara.

And this year, Irish fiction queens Cathy Kelly, Maeve Binchy, Cecilia Ahern, Patricia Scanlan and Marian Keys go head-to-head for the title of Eason Irish Popular Fiction Book of the year — a competition that is bound to attract a lot of attention.