Irish Women Writers Not Named Sally Rooney

Updated: Mar 17, 2023

Author

Carrie Thornbrugh

If you love Sally Rooney or stories about womanhood, sexual awakenings, and awkwardness then you’ve come to the right place. Ireland and its people possess a rich literary history and a reputation for garrulousness, but for every hilarious and absurd tale, there’s often a somber darkness skirting the edges. Irish novelist and playwright, Edna O’Brien put it plainly, “When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.” I can think of no better group to showcase this Irish tradition of determination, mournfulness, and wit than the wealth of contemporary Irish women writers mentioned below. For your March book club reading recommendations, here’s a fresh selection of Irish authors you should be reading right now!

collage of artistic images and women

The Dames

We’ll start with the dames, Edna O’Brien and Anne Enright, who have given the world decades of stunning memoir and fiction spanning themes of womanhood, sex, power, and imagination. Begin your education with O’Brien’s 1960 debut, The Country Girls, a book that was banned, burned, and denounced for breaking the silence of sexual and societal issues of post-war Ireland, and Enright’s Booker Prize-winning, The Gathering, which explores alcoholism, suicide, and familial trauma.

The New School

Nicole Flattery

Nicole Flattery's work has been published in The Stinging Fly, the White Review, Irish Times, and the 2019 Faber Anthology of New Irish Writing to name a few. Her debut collection of short stories, Show Them a Good Time, explores modern life through experiences of “young women in self-imposed exile, searching for meaning that they might never find.” Dig in for an honest, funny, look into the restrictiveness of women’s lives.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist whose work explores birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Ní Ghríofa’s genre-bending prose work A Ghost in the Throat, was voted Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and has been described as a “powerful” (New York Times), “captivatingly original” (The Guardian), and has rightly found praise through countless awards and admirers.

Anna Burns

Anna Burns was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and currently resides in London. Her novel Milkman, won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, the 2019 Orwell Prize for political fiction, and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Milkman is fashioned as a stream-of-consciousness psychological thriller set in the troubles-era North brimming with dark humor, angst, and absurdity.

Sara Baume

Novelist and graphic artist, Sara Baume was the winner of the 2015 Irish Book Newcomer of the Year award for her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, a tale of a lonely old man and his misfit dog. Death and loneliness are recurring themes for Baume, as well as the beauty and redemption that can be found in unexpected places.

Eimear McBride

At the age of twenty-seven, Eimear McBride wrote A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and spent the next nine years trying to have it published. McBride’s story about a nameless woman who is driven to despair by intimate family trauma and learns to use her sexuality as both a weapon and shield won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2014.

Claire Kilroy

This book recommendation is for all the super-fans out there who have devoured every Rooney title, but still have a nagging itch that you just can’t scratch. Kilroy’s 2009 novel, All Names Have Been Changed is set in the grittier and sexier 1980s version of Trinity College and centers on five creative writing students and the turbulent relationships they have with their famous tutor. Unlike Rooney’s characters’ ruminations, this story is told from a male perspective.

Cathy Sweeney

Cathy Sweeney is a short fiction writer and teacher from Dublin. Her critically-acclaimed work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and Banshee and in 2020 she published Modern Times, an inventive collection of 21 surreal stories full of effortless humor and poignancy running the gamut from a woman ordering a sex doll for her husband’s birthday to a married couple who take turns sitting in an electric chair.

Louise O’Neill

YA author Louise O'Neill’s first novel, Only Ever Yours, was released in 2014 and won the Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and her follow up second novel, Asking For It, earned widespread critical acclaim spending 52 consecutive weeks in the Irish top 10 bestseller list and has been optioned for the big screen. Both novels confront uncomfortable truths about Western culture, sexual assault, and consent. Recently she’s forayed into adult literature with her book, The Surface Breaks, a feminist reimagining of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen.

Hellen Cullen

Helen Cullen is an Irish writer and broadcaster. Her second novel The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually in Ireland and the UK (The Dazzling Truth in the USA and Canada) is a “compassionate portrayal of love, support, and grief…recognisable to anyone who has suffered from depression and mental illness.”

The Young One

Niamh Mulvey

Finally, up-and-coming talent Niamh Mulvey from Kilkenny, Ireland, is now based in South London. Her short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, and Southword and was shortlisted for the Seán O’Faoláin Prize for Short Fiction 2020. Her debut collection, Hearts and Bones explores what love does to us, and how we survive it. “Set between Ireland and London in the first two decades of this millennium, the stories look at the changes that have torn through these times and ask who we are now that we’ve brought the old gods down.”

photograph of woman holding a book in front of bookshop

Diverse Author Reading Inspiration:

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