The Game will be launched on June 2, in Waterstone’s Cork at 6:30 pm with Danny Denton. All invited! Thanks so much to Danny and John Breen and all the staff in Waterstones.
I’m thrilled with the cover of my forthcoming book The Game: a Journey into the Heart of Sport from Merrion Press in May. The cover was designed by Fiachra McCarthy of Fiachra McCarthy Design and it features a photo of me taken by my brother Dermot in Banna Strand, c. 1974. The book is now available to pre-order from your local bookshop or online from Merrion Press and the usual outlets.
I was delighted to launch Denis Hurley’s book Cork Hurling: Game of My Life with Denis in the lovely Cork Waterstone’s in Patrick Street. It was a really enjoyable event, especially after the tough two years we have put in, losing out on so much. Thanks to Denis and Liam Hayes from Hero Books for asking me to be there. There was a great crowd there including several hurlers who feature in the book. It’s a great book, I recommend it highly and it’s now available in all good bookshops. Here are some photos of the night, taken by the great John Breen of Waterstone’s.
I’m delighted that my essay ‘A Place Beyond Words’ has been published in Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. Aethlon is a publication of the Sports Literature Association, which is centred at East Tennessee State University. It’s a print journal published twice yearly and publishes works about sport and sport literature, including original fiction and poetry, juried scholarly and critical essays, and book reviews. My essay is about the intersections between art and sport and features in my upcoming book, The Game which will be published by Merrion Press. More information about my book here. More information about Aethlon here.
Big thank you to the42.ie for including my Irish Examiner Tribute to Canon O’Brien in its Best Sportswriting of the Week. I’m in some amazing company here. You can read the full selection here.
Big thank you to the novelist and sportswriter Eimear Ryan who included my next book The Game from Merrion Press (May 2022) in her list of sports books, Netflix series, films, and video games to watch out for in 2022. Her kind words were a lovely boost. Read all her recommendations here.
It was lovely to see my next book, The Game: A Lifetime Inside and Outside the White Lines listed in TheJournal.ie and The Irish Times as one of those to look out for in 2022. In such good company, it’s going to be an amazing year of writing.
I’m delighted to announce that my next book The Game: A Lifetime Inside and Outside the White Lines will be published by Merrion Press in May 2022. The book is a hybrid, a multifaceted meditation on sport. It is part memoir, outlining my time as a player and fan of sport and how it has shaped my life. It is also a book of essays critiquing several aspects of sport, both good and bad, and showing its influence in the wider world. It is also a work of auto-fiction, wherein I try use my novelistic abilities to chart narratives, personal and public. It is, finally, a work of scholarship, interweaving my own view of a life spent inside and outside the white lines with the cultural discourse of previous writers and thinkers on the many themes explored.
I was delighted to have my short essay: ‘Celebrating the Return of Hurling in a Strange Time’ in Cork Words 2: An Anthology of Contemporary Cork Writing among so many great Cork writers. It’s about the return of hope in a dark time. The book is available in Waterstones Cork and Cork City Libraries. The piece was previously published in The Irish Examiner.
I was delighted my little tribute to Diego Armanda Maradona was published in the 2021 Holly Bough. It really is a Cork institution.
