Irish · b. 1981
Lisa McInerney writes about Ireland's criminal underclass with dark comedy and linguistic flair. "The Glorious Heresies" (2016) won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize—a debut that follows a Cork crime family through a murder cover-up. McInerney's prose captures working-class Irish speech: profane, inventive, rhythmically alive. She writes about addiction, violence, and Catholicism's lingering grip on a country that has officially moved on.