Irish novelist Sally Rooney will present a reading on Friday, March 9 at 4:30 p.m. in East Pyne 010 on the Princeton University campus. The reading, which is free and open to the public, is presented by the Fund for Irish Studies series at Princeton University.

Writer Sally Rooney. Photo by Jonny L. Davies

Sally Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends was published in 2017 and was selected by The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph, and Evening Standard as a Book of the Year. The novel has been longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the 2017 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award: Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year, and the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers Choice Award. Rooney was the winner of the 2017 Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award. Born in Mayo and now living in Dublin, she is the editor of the literary magazine The Stinging Fly, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Dublin Review and elsewhere. Her new novel, Normal People, is being published in September.

A review of Conversations with Friends in The New Yorker states, “She [Rooney] writes with a rare, thrilling confidence, in a lucid and exacting style uncluttered with the sort of steroidal imagery and strobe flashes of figurative language that so many dutifully literary novelists employ.”

The Fund for Irish Studies, chaired by Princeton professor Clair Wills, affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics, and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.” The series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts. The spring 2018 edition of the series is organized by O’Toole as acting chair of the Fund for Irish Studies.

Information about the Fund for Irish Studies series events can be found at fis.princeton.edu. Other events scheduled in the current series include:

• Acclaimed filmmaker Pat Collins screens and discusses his documentary Song of Granite on April 6
• Alvin Jackson, the Sir Richard Lodge Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, presents the lecture “John Redmond and Edward Carson: Bloodshed, Borders and the Union State” on April 27

The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan, Jr. ’45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.