Nuala Ní Chonchúir
The Wind Across the Grass
ISBN:
This new edition of Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s debut short fiction collection presents 22 stories (including 4 new), exploring themes of adult-child relationships, death and violence, and the Irish sense of place. These are essential stories about families and relationships under strain: there is love and betrayal, sickness and passing, humour and rivalry, all told in a mix of adult and child voices, each voice as honest as the last.
‘… a gifted and ambitious artist, with a delicate feel for the accuracies and narrow tolerances of the short story’.
− Mike McCormack
‘Nuala Ní Chonchúir epitomises the poet/writer who uses the intensity of her poetry skills in prose to produce, in The Wind Across the Grass, sensualist microcosms of love, life and love gone astray. Here is a sharp but compassionate eye that can make us believe that these strange and wonderful characters breathe, hope and suffer … A good writer, like any good artist, should perturb and make us think. So, with this criteria, she fully deserves all accolades accorded to her’.
− Julia Bohanna, The Short Review
‘… one of Ireland’s most unusual and creative minds; her fiction is dressed in modernity, a ritual playing of the bones of Irish storytelling’.
Andrew Lovatt, Dead Drunk Dublin
‘She is a real writer’.
− Jeremy Addis, Books Ireland
‘Ní Chonchúir’s work is both sensual and provocative … she bares her soul and examines the world around her in visceral and challenging ways’.
− Marc Schuster, Small Press Reviews
‘Look for some big things to come from Galway’s Ní Chonchúir. She has such a diversity of work and can say so much in just a few words that it’s obvious she’s also an award-winning poet. Her stories are filled with very astute observations, some humorous, some sad’.
− The Readerville Journal
‘A bright and fresh collection of short stories exploring the promises and disappointments of love and relationships, this is a slightly and delightfully irreverent book full of female sensitivity and humour’.
− Des Kenny
‘Ní Chonchúir has a deft word-touch and is imaginative and resourceful with poetic ideas. Her work is vital and often funny and quirky, with a punchy diligence’.
− Fred Johnston, Kiosque
‘She has a modern irreverent sensibility’.
− Nessa O’Mahony, Poetry Ireland Review
‘There is passion, mythology and raw human experience. Reading Nuala Ní Chonchúir, you learn that your life is reflected in what she sees. It is this quiet invading honesty of her words that makes her writing real’.
− Órfhlaith Foyle, The Galway Advertiser
‘There is bright assessment here as Nuala Ní Chonchúir deftly sketches in her surroundings. Then emotions sweep in, deeper, unsettling. But confidence and intelligence are central in all of her writing, creating a safety net. She searches like a lighthouse, picking out the unusual’.
− Pat Jourdan, Women’s Studies Review
Nuala Ní Chonchúir was born in Dublin in 1970 and lives in County Galway. Her poetry was first anthologised as Molly’s Daughter in the first Arlen House ¡DIVAS! New Irish Women’s Writing collection in 2003. Her debut poetry collection, Tattoo ¦ Tatú (Arlen House, 2007) was shortlisted for the Strong Award. Her short fiction collections, The Wind Across the Grass (2004) and To the World of Men, Welcome (2005), were published by Arlen House, and in 2005 she edited the second ¡DIVAS! New Irish Women’s Writing anthology, ‘A Sense of Place’. Her third short fiction collection, Nude, was published by Salt in the UK in 2009. Nuala has won many short fiction prizes, including the inaugural Cúirt New Writing Prize, RTÉ’s Francis MacManus Award, the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award and the Cecil Day Lewis Award. She was chosen by The Irish Times as one of the ‘People to Watch in 2009’. In 2020 she published Birdie (Arlen House), a collection of flash fiction, and in 2021, Nora was released to international acclaim.