Family Affair: Una Mannion and Paul Murray

Paul Murray is Dublin-born author of four acclaimed novels. An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003) was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Skippy Dies (2010) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa Book. The Mark and the Void (2015) won the Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. The Bee Sting, published in 2023, won the An Post Irish Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize and the Nero Book Award. It was one of the Top Ten Best Books of 2023 in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Irish Times, The New Yorker, Time, The Independent, and others. Paul’s stories and journalism have appeared in New York, Granta, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and the New York Times.

Una Mannion was born in Philadelphia and now lives in County Sligo. She is the author of two novels, A Crooked Tree (2021) and Tell Me What I Am (2023). She has won numerous prizes for her writing including the Hennessy Emerging Poetry Prize, the Cúirt International Short Story Prize and the Kate O’Brien Prize for her debut novel. She teaches Creative Writing and English Literature at ATU Sligo.