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Award-winning Irish novelist and short-story writer Kevin Barry will hold a public book reading and signing at ������ý��Ƶ�����ƹۿ�’s Aloysius P. Kelley Center, on Monday, April 24, at 6:30 p.m. The free event is presented by the University’s Irish Studies Program and sponsored in part by the Humanities Institute of the College of Arts and Sciences, the English Department, M.F.A. Program and Community and Lifetime Education.

"The Irish Studies program is honored to be able to sponsor Barry’s visit," said the program's co-director, Professor Marion White. "It will provide an excellent opportunity for audiences, especially students, to hear one of Ireland’s leading authors read from his works and answer questions about his craft."

Barry, who lives in County Sligo, is the author of two-award winning novels. His City of Bohane (2011), won the Author’s Club Best First Novel Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature and the International IMPAC Dublin Award. Author Pete Hamill praised the novel as “Full of marvels. They are all literary marvels, of course:  marvels of language, invention, surprise. Savage beauty is here, but also laughter. And humanity. And the abiding ache of tragedy.”

Barry’s second novel, Beatlebone (2015) won the 2015 Goldsmith’s Prize, an honor awarded for work that “breaks the mold of fictional conventions.” The novel is based on John Lennon’s actual purchase of a small island in Clew Bay, County Mayo, and his imagined visit to it in 1978, close to the breaking point. The New York Times wrote, “Books like this come along once in a generation, books by writers with real chops, who haven’t been discouraged from taking chances and blurring the lines between disciplines.  Barry employs every tool in his formidable toolbox – razor-sharp prose, powerful poetics and a dramatist’s approach to dialogue unencumbered by punctuation.”

Barry is also the author of two-short story collections: There Are Little Kingdoms , winner of the 2007 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and 2012’s Dark Lies the Island, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and included stories published in The New Yorker.

For more information on the book reading and signing, contact Professor Marion White at mwhite@fairfield.edu .