Local Author Gains National Recognition

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In A Time Of Drought And Hunger by Gerard Beirne shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

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Submitted photo.

Eighteen months after winning the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award in 1996, Gerard Beirne moved, with his wife and three young children, from Ireland to a remote Cree First Nations community in northern Canada where the stories in this collection are set. Beirne now lives in Fredericton New Brunswick where he teaches at UNB and is a fiction editor with The Fiddlehead – Canada’s oldest ongoing literary magazine.

The Danuta Gleed Literary Award recognizes the best first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author published in 2015.

Beirne’s first novel, The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers), was short-listed for The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and selected by the literary editor of The Daily Express as his Book of the Year: ” …Wonderful clear prose and sensitive observation in a tough environment make this an outstanding debut work, scandalously ignored by this year’s Man Booker judges.”

Beirne has published two other novels and two collections of poetry. His short story, Sightings of Bono, was adapted as a film short featuring Bono (U2).

The winners of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award will be announced at the Canadian Writers’ Summit, June 15–19, 2016.

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