Paul Murray appointed Trinity Long Room Hub 2024 Rooney Writer Fellow

Paul Murray has been appointed as the Trinity Long Room Hub 2024 Rooney Writer Fellow.

The fellowship, which will begin in January 2024, will see him engage with the themes and community of the Institute, and the wider partner schools in the Arts and Humanities. He will continue work on a novel for younger readers but will use the residency opportunity to begin research on a novel for adults.

Speaking about his upcoming fellowship, the author commented: “One of the most exciting moments for a writer is the chance conversation that sparks off a new idea, which sometimes becomes a whole new novel. In the past I’ve benefited enormously from speaking to academics and researchers about their work, and I feel being part of the Long Room Hub community, surrounded by brilliant and passionate scholars, will be a wonderful opportunity for me.”

A Trinity College Dublin graduate of English and Philosophy, Paul Murray is the acclaimed author of four novels. An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003) was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Skippy Dies (2010) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and, in the US, the National Book Critics’ Circle Prize. 

The Mark and the Void (2015) won the Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and was one of Time Magazine’s ten best fiction books for 2015. His latest book The Bee Sting was shortlisted for the Booker prize and recently won the An Post Novel of the Year award.

Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, congratulated Paul on the success of his new novel commenting, “we are delighted to have Paul join our research community. His writing has always spoken fluently to an Ireland in different kinds of crisis, and has done so with both humour and humanity. I look forward enormously to seeing what he does next.”

The Rooney Writer Fellowship was launched in 2021 by Dr Peter Rooney, Director of the Rooney Prize Foundation. The Fellowship enables a creative writer to join the research community in the Trinity Long Room Hub and to engage with the institute’s many research projects and initiatives. Previous fellows have included author Caitríona Lally and poet, pacifist and fabulist Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe.

For more information contact aoife.king@tcd.ie