New Writers of the Celtic Wave

A brilliant crop of authors has made Ireland a world literary capital again

By Aingeal Conneely

Dec 16, 1995 | These are great times for Irish writing. In November, Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature, making him the fourth Nobel winner produced by this country of four million, after Yeats, Beckett and George Bernard Shaw. According to novelist and Irish Times literary critic Mary Morrissy, the latest blossoming of Celtic creativity has to do with Irish writing moving away from the parochial. Many of today's best authors are no longer compelled by the relationship with place, a perennial theme of Irish literature, turning instead to the urban experience, undervalued in Irish writing until now despite the heritage of James Joyce's "Ulysses," the ultimate city book.