“Kilroy has strikingly combined a poetic sense of language with a commitment to the narrative thrills required for good storytelling… We have here an unusual phenomenon: a novelist who knows the occult powers of descriptive language.”
“Tobias Hill has his own elegant, clear and complex, meditative way of inventing worlds. He is one of the two or three most interesting novelists working in Britain today.” A. S. Byatt, Guardian
The Irish Times
Claire Kilroy in conversation with Tobias Hill Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 2004 and shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004, Claire Kilroy was born in Dublin in 1973 where she still lives. She was the star pupil of the prestigious Trinity College Writing Programme and then worked for some years in television editing. In 2002 she received an Arts Council Literature Award, and since then has received immense critical acclaim for her debut novel, All Summer.
Wednesday 11 August
Kilbride Suite, Kilkenny Ormonde Hotel, 6pm Admission €12/€10
Born in London in 1970, Tobias Hill leapt to prominence with two collections of poetry, Year of the Dog, and Midnight in the City of Clocks (“impressively controlled”). Since then Hill has won over 100 awards for his work. His collection of short stories, Skin, first published to considerable acclaim in June 1997, won the 1998 Macmillan/Pen Award and was runner-up for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1998. Hill’s first novel, Underground, was published by Faber in April 1999 and in its new format in April 2000, and won an Arts Council Writers’ Award and a Betty Trask Award. Hill was rock critic for the Sunday Telegraph and is a regular reviewer for the paper. His latest novel, The Cryptographer, was published in August 2003.
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