Irish authors Paul Murray and Michael Magee named winners at inaugural Nero Book Prize

Irish authors Paul Murray and Michael Magee both took home awards at the inaugural Nero Book Prize last night; Murray for Book of the Year and Magee for the Debut Fiction Prize.

Paul Murray received the £30,000 Nero Gold prize for his fourth novel The Bee Sting, a comic family saga set in rural Ireland.

He was presented the award by Booker Prize winning author Bernadine Evaristo who praised his work for being "suspenseful and linguistically astonishing" and The Bee Stings'  "great wit and humanity".

“This is a wonderfully ambitious and entrancing novel about a family imploding against a background of Ireland’s economic and social crisis of the late 00s,” said the judging chair Bernardine Evaristo.

“Paul Murray is a supremely gifted storyteller as we learn of unspoken secrets and desires in difficult and sometimes dangerous situations, in a rich, multilayered novel that is both epic and intimate in scale.”

Murray penned the 650-page novel during the pandemic and it has since been shortlisted for a number of awards, including the 2023 Booker Prize but he was beaten by fellow Irish writer Paul Lynch who won with Prophet Song.

Murray's The Bee Sting was named this year's winner of Best Irish Novel at the An Post Book Award.

Michael Magee took home the award for best debut Fiction for his book Close to Home which details the story of two working class Belfast Brothers.

Magee will take home a prize of £5,000.

Elsewhere, Fern Brady was chosen as the winner for the best in nonfiction category for her memoir Strong Female Character, while The Swifts by Beth Lincoln was crowned winner of the children’s fiction category.

The Nero book awards were launched in May last year, just under a year after Costa abruptly scrapped its awards after 50 years. The judges are asked to choose books that “they would most want to recommend to others for their quality writing and readability”.