Limerick writer wins top award

A native Limerick man has won a New York literary prize worth €32,000 according to today’s Irish Times.

42 year old Patrick O'Keeffe(right) who is originally from Kilteely here in Limerick won a Whiting Writers' Award for emerging authors at an event in New York.

His work ,The Hill Road, is a collection of four novellas about “life in a fictional Limerick village”.

The Following is from an interview with the author,

The Hill Road is set in and around Co. Limerick. What brought you to write about it?

"I have not been there in ten years but when I began writing fiction in the US, in my late twenties, that’s what happened. The physical landscape is particularly vivid to me, and it became even more so in the writing because I began to recall specific details and images I thought I had forgotten, and also the way people talked and told things. I think in the stories it’s very much an invented place, though many of the physical descriptions of landscape and farm life are from memory."

Do you ever go back to Ireland, and specifically to County Limerick?

"I was in Ireland last Christmas, and that was the first time in ten years. I spent most of my time in Limerick, but I did visit old friends in Dublin. It was great to be back on the trains and the buses again."