16 December, 2024
Novel Fair 2025: Meet the Judges
Thank you to our five judges, Declan Burke, Roe McDermott, John Patrick McHugh, Lia Mills and Aiden O’Reilly who read each entry and selected the 12 winners, 12 runners-up and 12 highly commended for the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2025. Read about the judges and their experience of selecting this year’s winners below. Keep your eyes peeled on Wednesday (18th December 2024) for the announcement of this year’s winners!
About the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair
Each September, we have an international call out for manuscripts from unpublished (and unsigned) novelists who are searching for a home for their novels. Described by the Irish Times as ‘A Dragons’ Den for writers,’ the twelve Novel Fair winners will participate in a two-day event where they will pitch their novels to national and international publishers and literary agents.
Meet this year’s Judges
Declan Burke
“The great danger as a reader is that you can unconsciously fall into a comfort zone, reading according to preconceived ideas or preferences. It was an unexpected honour to be asked to help with the Novel Fair judging process, but the best thing was the sheer diversity of the storytelling I found myself exposed to. From literary realism to sci-fi, Irish mythology to romantic comedy, and many more forms besides, it was a wonderfully bracing experience.”
Roe McDermott
“Seeing our selection of winners together is a thrill, as our winners each have a truly distinct voice and tone for their stories, each of which feel fresh and exciting. Each of our winners left me greedy and impatient waiting for the rest of the story, so I hope professional success is generous and swift for all of our winners so I don’t have to wait much longer.”
John Patrick McHugh
“It was a true honour and privilege to judge the Novel Fair 2025. The standard of writing was high, the shortlisting process was competitive, and I feel very proud of the twelve winners we selected: each is a wonderful realisation of the author’s vision, each is unique and fresh and ready to be pitched.”
Lia Mills
“It’s hard to ‘judge’ the work of other writers in a competitive sense. I often felt, while reading through the Novel Fair entries for 2025, especially at the short-listing stage, that I was reading the work of professionals. I certainly felt that many of the scripts I read deserved to be brought to the attention of an agent or an editor… Some entries absorbed my attention so thoroughly that I was startled – and disappointed – to reach the 10,000 word cut-off point. This became my most basic consideration: whether or not I would keep reading if a submission arrived on my desk as a finished novel.”
Aiden O’Rielly
“Being a judge of the 2024 Novel Fair was a fascinating delve into the grassroots of writing in these strange times we live in. Selecting a shortlist seemed at times a weighty decision to make on the basis of a subjective feeling of enchantment. Yet there was an astonishing degree of overlap between the judges’ top choices. Most of the novels ‘chose themselves’. I’m delighted that some of the touchstone issues of our era show up, themes of media-saturation, future tech, cyber stalking, economic disparity, and environmental damage.”
Declan Burke is the author of Eightball Boogie (2003), The Big O (2007), Absolute Zero Cool (2011), Slaughter’s Hound (2012), Crime Always Pays (2014), The Lost and the Blind (2014), and The Lammisters (2019). Absolute Zero Cool was shortlisted in the crime fiction section for the Irish Book Awards, and received the Goldsboro Award for Best Humorous Crime Novel in 2012. Eightball Boogie and Slaughter’s Hound were also shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. Declan is also the editor of Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (2011) and Trouble is Our Business (2016), and the co-editor, with John Connolly, of Books to Die For (2013), which won the Anthony Award for Best Non-Fiction Crime. Declan was a UNESCO / Dublin City Council writer-in-residence for 2017-18. He blogs at Crime Always Pays.
Roe McDermott is a writer, journalist and Fulbright scholar with an MA in Journalism and an MA in Sexuality Studies from San Francisco State University. Roe is a columnist for The Irish Times, the film editor for Hot Press magazine and has had essays published on The Rumpus and The Coven. Roe has taught creative writing to students in secondary/high school, and at undergraduate and graduate level. In August 2020, Roe was awarded the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award for Literature and is currently working on her first essay collection which will explore PTSD, trauma, and patriarchal constructions of knowledge and credibility.
John Patrick McHugh is from Galway. His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Banshee, The Tangerine and Granta and been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. He is the fiction editor for Banshee magazine. His debut collection of short stories, Pure Gold, was published in 2021 and his novel, Fun and Games, will be published in 2025.
Lia Mills writes novels, short stories, literary essays, and memoir. Her novel, Fallen, was the Dublin/Belfast Two Cities One Book selection in 2016. Her work has been widely anthologised, most recently in Look! It’s a Woman Writer: Irish Literary Feminisms, edited by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (2021); Tearing Stripes off Zebras, edited by Nessa O’Mahony (2023), and Well, You Don’t Look It, edited by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (2024). A new edition of her first novel, Another Alice, was published in 2022 as part of the Arlen House Classic Literature series. Her non-fiction work has appeared most recently in The Dublin Review of Books, the Dublin Review, the EFACIS Kaleidoscope project, Yes, We Still Drink Coffee! (published by Front Line Defenders and Fighting Words), and The Danger and the Glory: Irish Authors on the Art of Writing, edited by Hedwig Schwall. A mentor on the Irish Writers Centre National Mentoring Programme, Lia is currently working on her fourth novel.
Aiden O’Reilly’s debut short story collection Greetings Hero was published in 2014. He studied mathematics, and has worked as a translator, a building-site worker, an IT teacher, and a property magazine editor. He won the biannual McLaverty award, and his fiction and essays have appeared in The Dublin Review, The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, Litro Magazine, The Missouri Review, the Winter Papers, the DRB, and many other places.
