The Art of Reading Book Club with Colm Tóibín – 'Trouble' by Philip Ó Ceallaigh
The Art of Reading is a monthly book club hosted by Colm Tóibín, the Laureate for Irish Fiction.
Each month, the Laureate meets a different library book club to discuss a book by an Irish writer, highlighting outstanding Irish writing and celebrating the reader and book clubs.
The selected titles celebrate new work by contemporary Irish writers, but previous episodes have also highlighted work from the past that the Laureate wishes to bring to a new generation of readers.
This episode features Colm in conversation with Philip Ó Ceallaigh about his short story collection, Trouble, published in 2021 - watch above.
Discussing the book, Colm said: "Philip Ó Ceallaigh is a brilliant, uncompromising and ambitious writer. On Trouble, the Los Angeles Review of Books wrote: ‘Ó Ceallaigh writes with such immediacy, such confessional intensity, that when the narrator leans in close and says, "Look — there lies trouble," it is impossible to look away."
Philip Ó Ceallaigh has published over fifty short stories, most of them gathered in his three collections. He has been described by John Banville as "a master" of the short story form and named by Rob Doyle as his "favourite living writer of short stories".
His work has appeared in Granta, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Irish Times and has been translated into over a dozen languages. He was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his first book, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse.
He is also an essayist and critic with a particular interest in Jewish-European history, and his translation of Mihail Sebastian’s interwar novel For Two Thousand Years was published by Penguin Classics. He lives in Bucharest, Romania.
The Art of Reading Book Club is an initiative of the Arts Council and the Laureate for Irish Fiction, in partnership with Libraries Ireland. Find out more here.
