Mike McCormack: ‘If I’ve one gift as a writer, it’s patience’

The award-winning Irish author on losing his father at 18, the drawbacks of English editors and the theme of imprisonment in his workMike McCormack was born in London in 1965 and raised on a farm in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He published his first story collection, Getting It in the Head, in 1996, followed by three novels that have marked him out as an experimentalist. Notes from a Coma (2005) interspersed its narrative with a fragmentary commentary at the bottom of each page. His work reached a wider audience with 2016’s Solar Bones, in which a lonely Mayo engineer recalls his life in one unending sentence – it won the Goldsmiths prize and was longlisted for the Booker. His latest novel, This Plague of Souls, follows a painter named Nealon as he returns home from prison and sets out to find his wife and child amid brewing global unrest. McCormack lives in Galway with his wife, artist Maeve Curtis, and their son.What sparked the new book?I started writing it in 2012, around the same time as Solar Bones, which then asserted priority. It seems that I was very interested in how worlds collapse, but coming into Covid, the focus changed from how the world collapses to how do we put it back together. Both books are about men trying to build a world – one as an engineer, the other as an artist – and both books seem to think that world building has to do with the making of family. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2023-11-11 18:00:01 UTC ]
News tagged with: #story collection #wider audience #solar bones #unending sentence #goldsmiths prize #returns home #started writing #irish author

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Announcing the “Both/And” Anthology Featuring Trans Writers of Color

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[ Electric Literature | 2024-07-11 19:06:00 UTC ]
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Author Challenges ChatGPT to Writer a Better Beach Read

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Authors ask Waterstones to rehire worker fired after tweet about gender-critical writer

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[ The Guardian | 2024-07-11 10:31:48 UTC ]
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Belle Point Press Centers Mid-South Writers and Their Work

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2024-07-03 04:00:00 UTC ]
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[ Book Riot | 2024-06-26 19:50:06 UTC ]
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12 Gifts for You and Your Book Club Buddies

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Generation Franchise: Why Writers Are Forced to Become Brands (and Why That’s Bad)

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Thomas McCormack, ‘One of the Great Contrarians of Publishing,’ Dies at 92

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2024-06-18 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Clive Myrie: ‘The closest I’ve come to death? Coming under attack while reporting in Iraq’

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These are the “most influential” writers of the year.

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[ Literrary Hub | 2024-04-18 17:45:48 UTC ]
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