KILNAMONA author Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s debut prose book A Ghost in the Throat has been named among the New York Times Best Books of 2021. The book has featured among the Times’s staff critics choices of the best fiction and nonfiction works of this year.
The book, which last year scooped the An Post Book of the Year Award, sees Doireann weave two stories together, with eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill haunting the life of a contemporary young mother who turns detective.
Ní Chonaill composed the great poem “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” after her husband was murdered by a powerful British official. The book which includes a translation of the poem, is a hybrid of essay, biography, autofiction and scholarship and a daily accounting of life with four children under the age of six.
“The book is all undergrowth, exuberant, tangled passage,” New York Times critic Parul Sehgal  wrote. “The story that uncoils is stranger, more difficult to tell, than those valiant accounts of rescuing a ‘forgotten’ woman writer from history’s erasures or of the challenges faced by the woman artist.”
Doireann is also author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), the Hartnett Poetry Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among others.