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 and the latest episode features Colm in conversation with Claire Kilroy about her novel, Soldier Sailor - watch above.
Claire Kilroy’s first novel in more than a decade deals with the early days and nights of motherhood. 'Soldier Sailor is a resonant and important book,’ Sarah Gilmartin has written in the Irish Times, ‘vital in all senses of the word, a flare sent up from the shores of early motherhood, a lesson in surviving the wilderness’.
Claire Kilroy is the author of five novels, All Summer (Faber, 2003), Tenderwire (Faber, 2006), All Names Have Been Changed (Faber, 2009), and The Devil I Know (Faber, 2012). In 2023, after an eleven-year silence, her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, about the early years of motherhood, was published to universal acclaim. It was named a Best Book by The Sunday Times, The Irish Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Telegraph, The New Statesman, The Irish Independent and The Independent. Kilroy won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2004 and has been shortlisted many times for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the Irish Book Awards. She studied at Trinity College and lives in Dublin.
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.
