Colm Tóibín has chosen Anna Fitzgerald’s deeply moving and beautifully written coming of age novel Girl in the Making (Sandycove) as the winner of the John McGahern Book Prize for best debut novel or short story collection by an Irish writer or writer resident in Ireland published in the year 2024. The annual prize, now in its sixth year, and sponsored by the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, carries an award of £5,000 and will be presented to Fitzgerald at the Liverpool Literary Festival, hosted by the university, on the weekend of October 17th-19th. The other shortlisted titles in what was a very strong year were Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson; Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon; and The Coast Road by Alan Murrin.
Tóibín commented on this remarkable debut: “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.”
Jean Kennedy and her family seem, on the face of it, like a typical south Dublin suburban group of the 1970s: mother, father, Jean, her older brother Tom, little sister Cissy, baby Cecil (and later John F.), younger twin brothers and Aunty Ida. Fitzgerald has a marvellous eye for the little details that filled that decade: Green Shield Stamps, David Cassidy records, Bonanza on the telly, banana and sugar sandwiches, and behind it all a vague and confused sense of the encroaching Troubles. Right from the start a sense of fear and barely contained violence pervades the book. To Jean, her bullying father Edmund is known throughout as simply HE or HIM. Jean’s childish puzzlement at why this wretched man should so dominate her home – a place that should be safe and comforting – is one of the narrative’s many convincing strengths.
The novel, dedicated to the author’s daughters, is constructed around a series of chapters running from 1966 to 1981, each titled after a year in Jean Kennedy’s life, starting at three and ending at 18. These chapters are gathered into three sections reflecting childhood, early teens and late teens.
One is reminded throughout of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the opening chapters, titled Three and Four, unpunctuated and diffuse, reflecting the thoughts of a little girl. Section Three, titled Seabird, in which Jean undergoes the beginning of a joyous transformation thanks to a positive university experience, prompts thoughts of Stephen Dedalus’s epiphany on Dollymount Strand.
A subsequent scene where Jean contemplates life while overlooking Sandymount Strand pulls us into the worlds of Ulysses and Gerty MacDowell. These Joycean tremors, handled by a less able writer, would be distracting, but Fitzgerald’s prose has a crispness and a depth that surprises and delights, particularly for a writer making her debut. That Fitzgerald grew up close to the Strand, a place she has always found spooky, gives such passages an authentic power distinct from any predecessor.
That we all now have access to this powerful work is the result of a series of fortuitous breaks. Fitzgerald has been writing fiction since she was seven – Girl in the Making is her eighth novel, the other seven remaining, for now at least, private affairs, unseen and unpublished. As a little girl, enraptured by Enid Blyton, she would run out of books to read and so have to write stories for herself. Allowed 15 minutes in her National School library every Friday, she found this space a place of peace and comfort. In secondary school she was blessed with an inspirational English teacher. The chance to write essays for this teacher, she tells me, “was the only reason I went to school.” As Fitzgerald entered adulthood, the writing of homework essays expanded into the composition of novels but she never seriously considered trying to publish.
Girl in the Making began life as one of these novels, written as a 21st-birthday gift for a daughter who, on reading the manuscript asked her mother if she could show it to friends. One of these readers worked in the arts and the manuscript eventually found its way to the fiction writer Ian Sansom, who sent Fitzgerald an enthusiastic and heartfelt review. The document next came into the hands of one Ireland’s top literary editors, Brendan Barrington at Sandycove Penguin, who admired and understood what Fitzgerald was trying to achieve through the modulating voice of Jean Kennedy. And so what had long remained private became public for the first time. Fitzgerald remembers an early sense of dread when the book appeared and she caught a glimpse of it in her home as though it were just another consumer product, a colourful box of cornflakes. “Why did I do that?” she recalls asking herself.
But those early misgivings have begun to abate. Fitzgerald, like all good writers, feels compelled to continue, whether for publication or not. “I am trying to work out things so that I can understand my place in the world better,” she tells me. While trying to be a strong, modern woman, Fitzgerald can feel the weight of old baggage: “all the time you are dragging along the era in which you grew up”. And this is true, she comments, not just for women but for men too: “Everyone’s hands are tied”.
The Ireland of the 1970s in which Jean Kennedy grows up is a place of unexamined conventions of gender, of secrets and unacknowledged unfairness. Perhaps not surprisingly, given these emphases, John McGahern’s The Dark made, and continues to make, a huge impression on Fitzgerald and she is especially pleased to have won a prize associated with his name. While on first reading McGahern’s banned classic, she admits to being “startled and shocked”, but she always admired the book’s “extraordinary simplicity”. On recently rereading it, she was overwhelmed by the book’s impulse towards forgiveness.
The John McGahern Prize for Debut Irish Fiction was established to promote new Irish writing and to celebrate the memory of one of the country’s greatest masters of prose fiction. Prof Pete Shirlow, director of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies, said: “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.”
Let us hope this book is the beginning of a writing career. Fitzgerald is now reworking one of those earlier novels she never thought to share. What will become of her revisions remains to be seen. “I’d like to get it right,” she tells me with the modesty of a true artist.
Anna Fitzgerald will read from her prizewinning novel at the Liverpool Literary Festival on October 19th. Entries are now being accepted for debut Irish books of fiction published in 2025. Details are available on the Institute of Irish Studies website.