Christine Dwyer Hickey

Christine Dwyer Hickey is an Irish novelist born in Dublin in 1958. She studied at the Brendan Smith Academy and began her career as an actress and playwright before becoming a novelist. Her novels include The Dancer (1994), The Gambler (1994), The Gatemaker (1997), Tatty (2004), Last Train from Liguria (2009), and The Lives of Women (2015). The Narrow Land (2019, Atlantic Books) is her novel set in Provincetown on Cape Cod in the summer of 1950, where the painter Edward Hopper and his wife Jo are vacationing, alongside the parallel lives of a young Irish couple and a grieving child. Exploring loneliness, artistic obsession, and the textures of mid-century American life, it won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2020 and the Dalkey Literary Festival Novel of the Year. Dwyer Hickey's work is distinguished by its psychological depth and its careful attention to the emotional lives of women and children in mid-twentieth-century Ireland and Europe.