Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting has won the An Post Irish Book of the Year award, the Irish Times reports.
Murray’s novel, published in the U.S. in August by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, tells the story of the Barnes family, whose lives are roiled by financial trouble, substance use, and mental illness. The book was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Kirkus Prize, with a Kirkus critic calling it “a grim and demanding and irresistible anatomy of misfortune.”
Madeleine Keane, chair of the judging panel for the prize, said in a statement, “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.”
Murray’s novel was one of six category winners to compete for the overall Book of the Year Award, alongside Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent; Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan; A Thread of Violence by Mark O’Donnell; The Grass Ceiling by Eimear Ryan; and I Am the Wind: Irish Poems for Children Everywhere, edited by Lucinda Jacob and Sarah Webb and illustrated by Ashwin Chacko.
The An Post Irish Book of the Year has been awarded every year since 2011. Previous winners include Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
