Lisa McInerney

The Irish writer Lisa McInerney was born in 1981 in County Galway and grew up with her grandmother in Gort. She studied at University College Cork. Her satirical blog »Arse End Of Ireland« was named best Irish blog for three years in a row. The writer Kevin Barry encouraged her to write short stories, which she published in various magazines as well as in »Town and Country: New Irish Short Stories«.

In 2015, she published her first novel »The Glorious Heresies«, which was awarded the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize for début novels. The plot is set in a crime-filled harbor environment. One night, Maureen Phelan is surprised by a burglar in her kitchen, whom she clubs to death with a Holy Stone. To dispose of the body, she summons her son Jimmy. As a child of wedlock, he grew up with his grandparents and in the meantime controls the town’s organized crime as a pimp and drug dealer. But Jimmy doesn’t want to get his hands dirty, either, and he convinces his old friend John to help him get rid of the corpse. John is an alcoholic who has six children to feed, so he can use the extra money. However, it is revealed that John’s oldest son, who is also involved in drug dealing, has a regular customer who for days has been desperately searching for her boyfriend Robbie, thus completing the circle. In her furious début novel, Lisa McInerney writes about the power of chance against the background of a society shaken by crises and shaped by violence and bigotry. Her language is authentic, expressive and extreme, and her humor is dirty and grotesque, reflecting the social environment of the characters and peppered with profanity. But the broken and complex characters are portrayed with so much empathy that they are never one-dimensional and instead begin to grow on the reader. In 2017, McInerey published her second novel »The Blood Miracles«, which earned her the 2018 Encore Award. In it, she continues the tale that began in »The Glorious Heresies« and tells the story of Ryan, who is now twenty years old and follows in the footsteps of his father after being released from his youth detention center. »Lisa Mcinerney is a writer busily combining the traditions of hardcore Irish crime writing with […] fast-talking foul-mouthed wit and gentle good humor.« (»Times Literary Supplement«)

The author lives in Galway.

Glorreiche Ketzereien
Liebeskind
München, 2018
[Ü: Werner Löcher-Lawrence]
The Blood Miracles
J. Murray
London, 2017