Tramp Press is delighted and excited to announce its 2020 list! Once again we’ll publish just three titles of outstanding literary merit, two in the spring and a third, a Recovered Voices title, in the winter.
With the support of the Arts Council, we will be bringing passionate, inventive and playful books to readers throughout Ireland and the UK in 2020.
2020 will mark Tramp’s seventh year of publishing. In that time, our authors have won the Dublin International Literary Award (IMPAC), the Goldsmiths Prize, the Davy Byrne’s Prize, the Rooney Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. They have also won the Irish Book Awards Book of the Year prize twice in the last three years (for Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones and Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self), and have been short- and long-listed for many others, including the Man Booker and the Costa.
First off we are delighted to brag that we have in our possession the third book by literary sensation Sara Baume!
handiwork by Sara Baume
(spring, non-fiction, trade paperback)
Pre-order here: https://www.kennys.ie/tramp-press-pre-order/handiwork.htm
In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist. A short, elegant piece that encompasses images and is itself a significant artifact, handiwork will offer more of the beautiful prose and extraordinary versatility you’ve come to expect from Sara Baume.
‘This little book is a love-child of my art and writing practices, or a by-product of novels past and coming. It’s about the connection between handicraft and bird migration, as well as simply the account of a year spent making hundreds of small, painted objects in an isolated house. It will be my third book with Tramp Press, and I’m thrilled that they continue to support my endeavours.’ – Sara Baume
Sara Baume’s debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and has been widely translated. In 2017, her second novel, A Line Made by Walking, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. She has also been awarded the Rooney Prize, the Davy Byrnes Award and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She works as a visual artist as well as a writer, and her first solo exhibition took place in autumn 2018. handiwork is her first work of non-fiction.
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
(spring, non-fiction, trade paperback)
Pre-order here: https://www.kennys.ie/tramp-press-pre-order/a-ghost-in-the-throat.htm
A true original, this stunning debut by Doireann Ní Ghríofa weaves two stories together. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem that reaches across the centuries to another poet. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy in her own life. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with finding out the rest of the story. A devastating and timeless tale about finding your voice by freeing another’s.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa has sculpted a fluid hybrid of essay and autofiction to explore the ways in which a life can be changed in response to the discovery of another’s – in this case, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, famously referred to by Peter Levi as ‘the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century.’
‘I first came to know Tramp Press as a reader, eagerly awaiting each new book they might publish, so it is a joy to be working with them to bring my debut book of prose to other readers. Writing A Ghost in the Throat has been a strange and joyous haunting, and I am so excited to share it.’
– Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual writer whose books explore birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Her latest poetry collection was chosen as a Book of the Year in both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. Doireann’s awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA, 2018), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University, 2018), the Ostana Prize (Italy, 2018), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (2016), among others. A Ghost in the Throat is her prose debut.
A Selection of Classic Irish Fantasy by Jack Fennell
(winter, trade paperback)
Following up from 2018’s show-stopper A Brilliant Void, author Jack Fennell, who’ll be featured at WorldCon in August returns with a collection of fantasy stories by Irish writers. Some you’ll know, some you won’t, all weird and wonderful! Once again, this collection will illuminate a side of Irish literary history that is often overlooked, and it’s going to have great craic doing it.
‘Putting together a science fiction anthology for Tramp’s Recovered Voices series was one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. Seldom does an opportunity arise to work with publishers so renowned for their taste and discernment, who also have a grá for stories about things like astronauts, dinosaurs and hairy babies. I’m beyond excited to be working with Tramp Press again, and I can’t wait to help bring some lesser-known Irish tales of wonder and wizardry to light.’
– Jack Fennell
Jack Fennell is a writer, editor, translator and researcher whose academic publications include pieces on science fiction, utopian and dystopian literature, monsters, Irish literature, and the legal philosophy of comic books. He is the author of Irish Science Fiction (2014), a contributing translator for The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013) as well as A Brilliant Void (2018), and a former Visiting Fellow at the Moore Institute in NUI Galway. He lives in Limerick.
We are grateful to the Arts Council for their support.
For queries or more information, please contact Sarah Davis-Goff at sarah@tramppress.com