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...Guardian first book award 2014 goes to Irish writer ‘who can go the distance’

“I grew up in a town like this, knew people infused with the same peculiar sensibility as this cast of characters,” Barrett wrote, “but do not let me mislead you by implying I have any authoritative judgment to deliver on this world. What fascinated me as I worked on these stories and incrementally built the world of Glanbeigh was how little I truly understood the people and places of this town.” Art thrives on such combinations of intimacy and mystery, he continued, “and so I resolved to draw the characters as meticulously and vividly as I could, but to simultaneously preserve the integrity of their essential unknowability.”