Kevin Barry

“You should read this collection at least twice. The first time, horse it into you—then study the technique.”

Naoise Dolan reviews That Old Country Music in The Stinging Fly.

“A desolate ferry terminal on the Spanish coast isn’t a place where you’d expect to encounter sharp-edged lyricism or rueful philosophy, but thanks to the two Irish gangster antiheroes of Barry’s novel, there’s plenty of both on display, along with scabrously amusing tale-telling and much summoning of painful memories.”

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry has been named one of the ten best books of 2019 by the New York Times.

“Annie Dillard said once that the only advice any writer needs is to keep your overheads low. In our present epoch, this means you have to be very, very careful about where you choose to live. I live cheaply in the rural north west of Ireland and this means I don’t have to teach, I can just write. The city as an entity really doesn’t want anything to do with writers anymore—we’ve been priced out, as have all creative people except those from backgrounds of privilege. So screw the city—it’s the city’s loss.”

Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier, answers five questions on writing and its obstacles over at Literary Hub.

The Financial Times have been enjoying the audiobook of Night Boat to Tangier read by Kevin Barry himself:

“Barry is a marvel: menacing, insistent, switching from brooding descriptions of the men’s nocturnal surroundings to their terse dialogue. The conviction with which he explores their search for Charlie’s missing daughter never fails.”

“Barry, winner of the Impac Dublin literary award for City of Bohane and the Goldsmiths prize for Beatlebone, is a clairvoyant narrator of the male psyche and a consistent lyrical visionary. The prose is a caress, rolling out in swift, spaced paragraphs, a telegraphese of fleeting consciousness…”

Alan Warner reviews Night Boat to Tangier in the Guardian.

‘As quick-witted as a stand-up comic and as serious as the best of them tend to be, Kevin Barry is not only an inspired blend of Flann O’Brien and Anthony Burgess, he is an original.’

‘As Barry follows John’s strange journey, the boundaries between fact and fiction, author and subject, past and present morph. Dark, trippy and comic, Beatlebone is a heady exploration of creativity and identity’

‘If the novel loses innovation it’s f****d’: Beatlebone wins the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize.

‘Books like this come along once in a generation … It all hangs together perfectly to form the kind of next-level literature that inspires, even incites another generation of natural-born wordsmiths to write big and bold and put in the work it takes to become a beast.’