Anakana Schofield has won the €15,000 (about $18,300) Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award for Bina, the Irish Times reported. Judge Rachel Cusk called the winning work "fiction of the rarest and darkest kind, a work whose pleasures must be taken measure for measure with its pains."
Schofield said: "This book prize is literally a life saver! For the past six months, I have been working at the local Covid lab to make ends meet, which, while useful for contributing to the pandemic, has made it very difficult to finish my next novel.... Irish literature has always been a diasporic literature, and I appreciate being included, even though writers inevitably feel inadequate every time they pick up a pen. We should be aiming for a diverse literature, and I rejoice that it's no longer only the exclusive domain of snooty blokes in polo necks. It was women journalists in the Irish Times who inspired me as a 20 year old that I might someday write, and now, at age 50, as the most unlikely person to succeed as a writer, I have written three novels."
In addition, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin won the €10,000 (about $12,200) Pigott Poetry Prize for her Collected Poems.