Donal Ryan

Donal Ryan is an Irish novelist and short story writer born in 1976 in Nenagh, County Tipperary. He worked for fifteen years as a civil servant before becoming a full-time writer. His debut novel The Spinning Heart (2012, Lilliput Press) was rejected by over forty agents before finding a publisher; it went on to win the Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the EU Prize for Literature. His subsequent novels include The Thing About December (2013), All We Shall Know (2016), From a Low and Quiet Sea (2018), Strange Flowers (2020), and Heart, Be at Peace (2023). Heart, Be at Peace follows a Tipperary farming family across several generations, exploring how land, family obligation, and love shape an Irish community. It won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2025. Ryan's fiction is celebrated for its lyrical warmth, its ear for the rhythms of rural Irish speech, and its compassionate attention to working-class and farming communities in Ireland.