The Bee Sting by Paul Murray wins An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray has won the An Post Irish Book of the Year. The book was among six titles which made the shortlist, all of which were category winners in the An Post Book Awards 2023.
The Bee Sting, which was also shortlisted for The Booker Prize, was unveiled as the winning title during a one-hour special television show aired on RTÉ One yesterday evening hosted by Oliver Callan.
Described in The Guardian as a “brilliantly funny, deeply sad portrait of an Irish family in crisis”, The Bee Sting attracted a chorus of unanimously positive reviews on publication.
Paul Murray was born and raised in South Dublin and wrote his first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, while studying for a MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, with the novel going on to be shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and nominated for Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Murray’s tragicomic Skippy Dies was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and longlisted for The Booker Prize. The Mark and the Void was the joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was named one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year.
The overall winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023 was decided by the judging panel: literary editor of the Sunday Independent Madeleine Keane; award winning author Sinead Moriarty; broadcaster Rick O’Shea; accountant and An Post’s key liaison lead with IPC Cyril McGrane; and Children’s Books Ireland CEO Elaina Ryan.
Madeleine Keane, Chair of the judging panel, said that the judges were unanimous in choosing The Bee Sting as the winner. “Paul Murray is an exceptional contemporary Irish novelist as evidenced in his fine body of work, culminating in this dazzling achievement. The Bee Sting is a bravura feat—a wildly funny, tragic giant of a novel with a symphony of compelling voices. Murray evokes Ireland’s complexities and vagaries while taking in vital universal themes of love, greed, desire, and disappointment. Along with my fellow judges, I am very proud to see it crowned the most outstanding book of 2023.”
Previous winners of the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award include Sally Hayden for My Fourth Time, We Drowned, Fintan O’Toole for We Don’t Know Ourselves, Doireann Ní Ghríofa for A Ghost in the Throat, the late Vicky Phelan for Overcoming, Emilie Pine for Notes to Self, John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil, Mike Murphy and John Borgonovo for Atlas of the Irish Revolution, Mike McCormack for Solar Bones, Louise O’Neill for Asking For It, Mary Costello for Academy St, Donal Ryan for The Spinning Heart, Michael Harding for Staring at Lakes, and Belinda McKeon for Solace.
