Gethan Dick has been named the recipient of this year’s Kate O’Brien Award at the Limerick Literary Festival, for her novel Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night!
The Kate O’Brien Award, presented annually to an exceptional debut by an Irish female writer, celebrates bold, original storytelling. The prize is generously sponsored by Bill and Denise Whelan.
Gethan and her fellow shortlisted authors, Sharon Guard for Assembling Ailish (Poolbeg), Elaine Garvey for The Wardrobe Department (Canongate) and Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin for Ordinary Saints (Manilla Press), read from their work at the Belltable Theatre, and talked about their experience of writing and being published.
Bill Whelan spoke about the importance of supporting artists early in their career, before awarding Gethan the €5,000 prize, affirming her place among the most compelling literary voices of her generation.
We extend our thanks to the judging panel and organisers of the award for their commitment to championing new writing, and congratulations to the other shortlisted authors.
Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night is a novel about hope, wolves, companionship and resilience, hunger and gold. It’s about an underachieving millennial, a retired midwife and a charismatic Dubliner who set out from London after the end of the world to cycle to a sanctuary in the southern Alps.
It’s about packing light and choosing the right companions and trousers: what’s worth knowing, what’s worth living, and holding on to your sense of humour in moments big and small.
It’s about the fact that the world ends all the time. It’s about what to do next.
Pick up a copy from your favourite bookseller, or click here. Gethan has made 80 limited-edition bookmarks which we will send out with orders while they last.
Gethan Dick was born in 1980 in Belfast and grew up in the West of Ireland. She moved to London for an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. She then studied at Camberwell College of Art and shifted her creative practice towards text-based and co-created visual art. She moved to Marseille, France, where she has lived since 2011, working as one half of visual-arts duo gethan&myles with her partner, Myles Quin. They have two children, and in her spare time she swims, cycles, jumps off rocks into the sea or heads for the hills.
Praise for Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night
‘Original and lyrical … unlike anything I’ve read in recent memory’
– Johny Pitts, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book
‘Its originality lies in the appeal of the narrative voice, one of millennial
diffidence that is still somehow salted with optimism’
– Erica Wagner, The Guardian
‘Ambitious, inventive and stirring debut novel’
– Niamh Donnelly, Irish Times
‘Brilliant and daring debut … this is a novel of planetary catastrophe like
no other, eschewing the hackneyed clichés of the genre’
– Eoghan Smith, Irish Examiner
‘The first-person narration is smart and tight, and the humour is
razor-sharp … Gethan Dick is a writer worthy of our time’
– Anne Griffin, Irish Independent
‘Vast, generous, funny, resistant and alive’
– Valérie Manteau, novelist and winner of the Prix Renaudot