Paul Murray wins Nero Book Award in fiction category
The freshly launched Nero Book Awards celebrate books and writers from the UK and Ireland published in the past 12 months across four categories: children’s fiction, debut fiction, fiction and non-fiction. Of these four category winners, one book will be selected as the overall winner and recipient of the Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year, to be announced at a ceremony in London on 14th March.
Paul Murray has won the fiction category for his fourth novel, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton), the latest in a string of prize nods including a Booker shortlisting, an An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023 win and a nomination for The Writer’s Prize 2024. At 650 pages, the novel took five years to complete and tells the story of a middle-class Irish family in turmoil, as the effects of the post-2008 banking crisis take their toll. Judges said: "Hilarious and tragic in equal measure, The Bee Sting is a gripping saga of one highly dysfunctional family that asks if a single moment of bad luck – a patch of ice on the road, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil, can change the direction of a life?"
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