Kevin Barry is the co-editor of Winter Papers Vol 2, Ireland’s annual anthology for the arts, out now.

He is the author of the novel City of Bohane and two short story collections, Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. He was awarded the Rooney Prize in 2007 and won The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize in 2012. For City of Bohane, Barry was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Irish Book Award, and won the Author's Club First Novel Prize, The European Prize for Literature and the IMPAC Prize. Kevin’s latest novel Beatlebone was published in 2015 and won the Goldsmith’s Prize 2015.

Film

I’m very much looking forward to I Am Not Your Negro, the Raoul Peck documentary about the writer James Baldwin and his engagement with the Civil Rights movement in the US in the 1960s. It builds a narrative from lines taken directly from Baldwin’s letters, essays and diaries and is by all accounts a stunner.

Music

I’m a martyr for ambient-folky ephemeral waft-outs and have been playing the latest  from The Magnetic North to death over the last couple of weeks. Prospect Of Skelmerdale  is again a kind of documentary piece, a sequence of songs depicting the weird Lancashire 1960s ‘new town’ of that name – it was a kind of failed utopia, and it has resulted in a stunningly beautiful record.  

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Book

I’ve been reading George Saunders’ first novel, Lincoln In The Bardo, in a proof copy; it’s not out for a couple of months. Saunders is of course known as a marvellous short story writer and I was interested to see how his dense and hyper-expressive style might adapt over the stretch of a novel – in fact, he abandons it completely, and builds a novel from quotations, some from real historical sources, others from imagined sources, all combining to portray Abraham Lincoln grieving for a lost son. It’s a deeply strange and very moving book.

Play

I hope to get along to the Amy Conroy play Luck Just Kissed You Hello when it tours around the country in November – I’m hearing great things about it, and she’s a very gifted writer.

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TV

Having abandoned the deeply annoying and unfathomably acclaimed Stranger Things two episodes in, I’ve instead been gorging on another Netflix show, Bloodline. A family drama set in the Florida quays, it’s kind of over-ripe and gothic and in places a bit ludicrous but it’s got some very strong performances and is very watchable.

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GIG

I might get to see Rodrigo y Gabriela, Ireland’s finest Mexican instrumentalist ensemble, at Sligo Live this weekend; they’re out on their own. Ages since I’ve been at anything; I did see The Pixies in the Iveagh Gardens in June but I much prefer to see them indoors – the manic intensity can kind of float away into the sky a bit at an outdoor show.

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Art 

I was thrilled to do a collaboration with the artist Kathy Prendergast a couple of years ago and I see that she has a major new show, Atlas, coming up at the Kerlin in Dublin.

Radio/Podcast

I don’t touch the dial too much to be honest – it’s set at Lyric and stays there most of the day and night. Might I take the opportunity, however, to condemn Today FM’s cancelling of Friday Night '80s? We are bereft.

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Tech

I’m not in any way techy or appy – I’m trying to get away from all that horrible stuff.

The Next Big Thing

Some very intesting books coming from Irish writers over the next six months or so – Mark O’Connell’s non-fiction To Be A Machine, from Granta, is an exploration of the deeply strange American transhumanism movement, while the extremely talented Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, is on the way from Faber in the new year.