The August Art of Reading book club features Colm in conversation with Professor Frank Shovlin about The Barracks by John McGahern. Listen here or watch below.  

“This bleak, unrelenting novel portrays a woman in the Irish midlands who has married a policeman and become a surrogate mother to his children in the time after his first wife’s death. Elizabeth, too, is facing her own death. Her character is drawn with great sympathy. The most intimate moments are handled with piercing sensitivity and truthfulness.” Colm Tóibín

John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and raised in Leitrim and Roscommon. A graduate of UCD, he worked as a primary school teacher and held various academic posts at universities in Britain, Ireland and America. He is the author of six novels and four collections of short stories. His novels included The Barracks (1963); The Dark (1965); The Leavetaking (1975), The Pornographer (1980), Amongst Women (1990) and That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001). He published his much acclaimed Memoir in 2005. His short story collections were Nightlines (1970); and High Ground (1985) which were published as The Collected Stories (1992). He also wrote plays for radio, television and theatre. He received many awards, including the Æ Award (1962); the Macaulay Fellowship (1964); Chevalier d’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1989); The Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literary Award (1990); the GPA Award (1992); and the Prix Étranger Ecureuil (1994). He was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1990 for Amongst Women. His work has been translated into many languages. On his death in 2006, he was acclaimed as ‘the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett’ by The Guardian. 

Frank Shovlin was born and raised in the West of Ireland, and was educated at University College Galway and at the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Irish Studies since 2000 and is the author of several books, articles and chapters on various aspects of Irish literature since 1900. His most recent book was an edited volume of John McGahern's letters, released by Faber to critical acclaim in 2021. He is currently writing McGahern's authorized biography under contract at Faber.