The winner of the John McGahern Prize for debut book of Irish fiction (2024) has been named as Anna Fitzgerald for her book Girl in the Making.
Now in its sixth year, the prestigious prize was established by the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies to promote new Irish fiction and to celebrate the memory of one of Ireland’s greatest masters of prose fiction, John McGahern (1934-2006).
Fitzgerald will read from her winning book and be presented with her £5,000 prize at the Liverpool Literary Festival at the Victoria Gallery & Museum on Sunday 19 October, 5.30pm.
Girl in the Making was chosen from a shortlist picked by esteemed author and former Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, Colm Tóibín.
Commenting on the winning entry Colm Tóibín said: “Anna Fitzgerald’s Girl in the Making is written in the pitch-perfect voice of a girl who is a born noticer. This is suburban Dublin in the 1970s and 1980s, captured in careful, accurate detail. The family in focus here may seem comfortable, may appear ordinary. Indeed, some of the tensions are registered by Jean the narrator with calmness and plainness so that they seem ordinary too. But then, with extraordinary skill, Anna Fitzgerald reveals what is really happening in this house and to the delicate consciousness at the heart of the story. This is a novel of concealment and shocking revelation. In working so closely with intimate emotions and domestic traumas, Fitzgerald has managed to create an unforgettable heroine and a dark picture of the world around her.”
Professor Peter Shirlow, Director of the Institute of Irish Studies, remarked, “Anna Fitzgerald’s Girl in the Making is exactly the sort of book we hoped we could promote when originally thinking about the establishment of a new literary prize in 2019. Here we have a bold new voice who we feel ought to have gained greater attention than has hitherto been the case. We very much hope that the prize will promote the reading of her work among a wider audience and encourage Anna to continue in her efforts at fiction writing.”
Girl in the Making is a remarkably strong debut with echoes of both James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. In subject, though not in style, it is reminiscent of one of the 21st century’s strongest debuts, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, following as it does the life of a troubled girl, Jean Kennedy, growing up in south Dublin over 15 years. Coming to maturity surrounded by a beloved mother, a hated father (known only as He or Him throughout), a sexually predatory uncle and her siblings, this coming-of-age novel is ultimately a hopeful consideration of the power of literature to teach, to transform and to heal.
Tickets for Fitzgerald’s talk at Liverpool Literary Festival are free, but please sign up to attend and view the full programme for the Liverpool Literary Festival here: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/literary-festival/events-2025/
You can read the Irish Times article about Girl in the Making here.