Ruth Gilligan

Ruth Gilligan is an Irish novelist and academic born in Dublin in 1986. She began writing fiction as a teenager and published her debut at nineteen. She studied English at Trinity College Dublin and at the University of Cambridge, where she completed a PhD on the representation of Irishness in contemporary fiction. The Butchers (2020, Atlantic Books) is her fifth novel, set in Ireland during the BSE crisis of the 1990s and following four interconnected narratives — a travelling cattleman, a young female journalist, a teenage boy, and a photographer — circling around violence, tradition, and a darkly mythologised Ireland. It won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2021 and was widely celebrated as a significant advance in her literary career. Gilligan teaches creative writing at the University of Birmingham. Her earlier novels, written in her teens and early twenties, are distinct in tone and audience from her mature literary fiction.