Age no bar for Man Booker nominees but mixed news for Irish

This year’s shortlist for the revered Man Booker novel prize had good news and disappointment for Irish writers. Sally Rooney — considered a favourite — and Donal Ryan didn’t, for the judges, make the grade, while Belfast’s Anna Burns did.

What comes as no surprise is the unwarranted attention given to the ages of novelists whose work pleases the judges if, sometimes, relatively few readers. The 2018 shortlist includes the youngest-ever writer to be so honoured: Daisy Johnson is a mere 27.

But, we ask, so what? Shakespeare was 26 when he wrote his first play, Mary Shelley was 19 when she gave the world Frankenstein, and, in our own time, Bret Easton Ellis, best known for American Psycho, wrote his debut, Less Than Zero, at the tender age of 21.

Youth should not be a bar, and neither should the experience, and sometimes wisdom, that comes with the long decades, as Mary Wesley demonstrated when her first novel for adults was published: She was a hearty 71.