15 followers
28 books added

Colin Barrett

Ireland (b.1982)

Colin Barrett was born in 1982 and grew up in County Mayo. In 2009 he completed his MA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin and was awarded the Penguin Ireland Prize. His work has been published in The Stinging Fly magazine and in the anthologies, Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press, 2010) and Town and Country (Faber and Faber, 2013).

Colin received bursaries from the Arts Council in 2011 and 2013.

Awards: Nero (2024), NBA (2015) see all

Genres: Literary Fiction

Novels

Wild Houses (2024)

Collections

Young Skins (2013)
Homesickness (2022)

Novellas and Short Stories

The waiting room (2016)
Calm With Horses (2020)

Books containing stories by Colin Barrett

The Best Short Stories 2024 (2024)
(O. Henry Prize Stories)
edited by
Amor Towles

The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2022 (2022)
(Best Mystery Stories of the Year, book 2)
edited by
Sara Paretsky and Otto Penzler

Awards

	2024 Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction : Wild Houses
	2015 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 : Young Skins
	2014 Guardian First Book Award : Young Skins

Award nominations

	2025 Dublin Literary Award (longlist) : Wild Houses
	2025 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award (longlist) : Wild Houses
	2024 Booker Prize (longlist) : Wild Houses

Colin Barrett recommends

All Them Dogs (2026)
Djamel White
"With care and verve, Djamel White brings vividly to life the genial malice and ambient dread that infuses All Them Dogs world of feuding West Dublin gangsters."

The Benefactors (2025)
Wendy Erskine
"Wendy Erskine is off doing her own, consummate thing. The Benefactors is a novel as perfectly pitched, surefooted, and charged with feeling as her gleaming, precise stories."

Free Therapy (2024)
Rebecca Ivory
"The stories in Free Therapy are unerring, ferociously original, cooly controlled and queasy with revelation. They live viscerally in you for days afterward."

Lazy City (2023)
Rachel Connolly
"In the wry and compassionate Lazy City, Rachel Connolly deftly captures both the intoxicating chaos and listlessness of young adulthood, when life seems both full of possibility and impossibly elusive."

The Sea Elephants (2023)
Shastri Akella
"Akella's debut novel is a compelling, beautifully assured and intense coming-of-age story about the wounding ferocity and terrible innocence of desire, and the resilience and hard-won wisdom by which love comes to know itself."

The Late Americans (2023)
Brandon Taylor
"Tender and unflinching . . . written with bristling clarity, wicked wit and audacious assuredness. . . . A wonderful book."

Close to Home (2023)
Michael Magee
"Close To Home announces an exciting new voice - at once open and wary, tender and unyielding - and sharply alive to the pains and discoveries and mysteries of youth."

Nothing Special (2023)
Nicole Flattery
"Flattery's sentences are astonishing. Their wit and ingenuity, the apt oddness of her metaphors, are addictive and relentlessly delightful, and then all of a sudden her language snaps into an exactness of feeling that knocks you sideways. A special, singular, blazingly original and truly achieved first novel."

We Move (2022)
Gurnaik Johal
"Delicate, controlled and moving portraits of the strange, poignant dislocation wrought by both distance and proximity."

Diving for Pearls (2021)
Jamie O'Connell
"Shimmering, beguiling and ruthless. A fizzing and assured debut."

The Rules of Revelation (2021)
Lisa McInerney
"An enthralling and expansive novel. There is no mistaking the brilliantly inventive, savage, technicolour bounce of McInerney's prose."

little scratch (2020)
Rebecca Watson
"Reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion... daring and completely readable."

Hollow in the Land (2020)
James Clarke
"A beautifully melancholy and worldly book. Clarke's characters may lead quiet, thwarted lives but his prose is generous and electrifying, unjudgmental and assured. A brilliant new talent."

For The Good Times (2019)
David Keenan
"David Keenan's powerful and original new novel about the troubles is intense, violent, eerie, and grizzedly poignant."

Normal People (2018)
Sally Rooney
"Sally Rooney is a writer going all the way to the top."

Reservoir 13 (2017)
(Reservoir)
Jon McGregor
"Reservoir 13 is a masterfully paced and grippingly controlled read that finds the shadows, the wildness, in the ordinary heart of a community."

Born on a Tuesday (2016)
Elnathan John
"Elnathan John’s debut coming of age novel is a striking and unnervingly assured depiction of a complex and tumultuous world. John’s writing is controlled and lucid, full of compassion yet fiercely unerring."

More recommendations

Visitors also looked at these authors

About Fantastic Fiction Information for Authors