A bold book in every meaning of the word: vivid in its characters, confident in its handling of all sorts of ideas, full of irreverence and mischief. Very, very funny yet
full of intelligence and seriousness of purpose.
- Wendy Erskine
In this rich collection Rosemary Jenkinson illustrates how the short story is an apt genre to represent the complex tangles left in people's minds a quarter-century after the Good Friday Agreement. While Greater Belfast is represented by protagonists ranging from Catholic members of the police and a former Protestant paramilitary to customs officials hampered in their jobs by mobs, non-Irish make an appearance too as they face war in Ukraine. As transgenerational trauma, drugs and Brexit hit protagonists from different walks of life, Jenkinson's style mixes empathy with striking similes and dry humour. While the individual stories are cleverly constructed, the whole collection is interwoven with repeat motifs, especially the bookending stories which subtly echo each other.
- Hedwig Schwall
Rosemary Jenkinson is Belfast's pleasure laureate
- Caroline Magennis
Rosemary Jenkinson is a playwright, poet and fiction writer from Belfast. She taught English in Greece, France, the Czech Republic and Poland before returning to Belfast in
2002. Her plays include The Bonefire (Stewart Parker BBC Radio Award), Planet Belfast, Here Comes the Night, Michelle and Arlene, May the Road Rise Up and Lives in Translation. Her plays have been performed in Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Brussels, New York, Washington DC and Belfast. Arlen House publish her latest plays Billy Boy (2022) and Silent Trade (2023).
In 2018 she received a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was writer-in-residence at the Lyric Theatre Belfast in 2017 and at the Leuven Centre
for Irish Studies in 2019. Her short story collections include Contemporary Problems Nos. 53 & 54, Aphrodite's Kiss, Catholic Boy (shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature), Lifestyle Choice 10mgs (shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize) and the bestselling Marching Season published by Arlen House in 2021. The Irish Times praised her for 'an elegant wit, terrific characterisation and an absolute sense of her own particular Belfast.
Translation missing: en.general.search.loading