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Caoilinn Hughes

Ireland

Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish writer whose poetry collection Gathering Evidence (Carcanet, 2014) won the Irish Times Shine/Strong Award and was a finalist for the Seamus Heaney Prize, the Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers' Week, the Royal Society of NZ Science Book Prize and the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry.

She is a fellow of the James Merrill Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Centre Culturel Irlandais, the Tin House Summer Workshop, Art Omi, and she has received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and the Ireland Funds Monaco Award. Her work has appeared in Tin House, POETRY, Granta, Best British Poetry, Poetry Ireland, BBC Radio 3, and elsewhere. She divides her time between the Netherlands and Ireland.

Awards: RSL (2021) see all

Genres: Literary Fiction

Novels

   Orchid & the Wasp (2018)
   The Wild Laughter (2020)
   The Alternatives (2024)

Collections

Gathering Evidence (poems) (2014)

Series contributed to

BBC National Short Story Award
BBC National Short Story Award 2025 (2025) (with others)

Books containing stories by Caoilinn Hughes

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019 (2019)
(O. Henry Prize Stories)
edited by
Laura Furman

Awards

2021 Encore Award : The Wild Laughter

Award nominations

2025 BBC National Short Story Prize (nominee) : Two Hands

Caoilinn Hughes recommends

Prestige Drama (2026)
Séamas O'Reilly
"There is hilarity and pathos on every page. Utterly engaging and authentic, Prestige Drama says so much about Derry and its people, about Irish culture and its pathologies, and about the challenges and necessity of storytelling in a heavily storied place."

At Sea (2026)
Y M Abdel-Magied
"Written with the urgency of a thriller and the distress signal of an allegory, At Sea is a smart, razor-sharp takedown of the machismo of big oil and what it is to be a woman operating in such a hostile industry. Abdel-Magied tells this compelling story with a fresh, authoritative voice."

Upward Bound (2026)
Woody Brown
"Upward Bound is a highly original, captivating, brilliantly observed novel about the power of human relationships and the complexities of communication."

The Benefactors (2025)
Wendy Erskine
"What a voice. What assurance and execution. Wendy Erskine writes like nobody else. The Benefactors is a masterful, memorable, electric novel that conveys a community of people and all their dramas pitch-perfectly, seemingly without manipulation, because the craft is deft and the feeling is real as all hell,"

Parallel Lines (2025)
Edward St. Aubyn
"Parallel Lines depicts characters whose hold on reality is fragile or fraught, but this novel's hold on reality is sure and convincing and passionate... [It is] dressmaker-deft on adult sibling relationships, on patient-therapist challenges, on the surprises of middle-age, on the pressure to accept our circumstances."

The Boy from the Sea (2025)
Garrett Carr
"An original and rambunctious Irish seafaring novel that vividly portrays a community moving through changing times and tides-as lively a portrait as it is convincing. With a refreshing narrative approach, The Boy From the Sea excels in its clarity and particularity of voice."

Madwoman (2024)
Chelsea Bieker
"This intense, propulsive novel takes an age-old story right up to the minute. In portraying the exhausting attempt to overcome violence and safeguard loved ones, Bieker writes with urgency, integrity and emotional acuity."

Enlightenment (2024)
Sarah Perry
"Gorgeous, galvanic, omniscient, intimate and eminently giving, Enlightenment is a novel to live with and learn by. As I read it, I felt housed by it. And, damn, did the house have skylights. Sarah Perry is a national treasure, and this is her best book yet."

The Gospel of Orla (2023)
Eoghan Walls
"Eoghan Walls writes with humour, inventiveness and irreverence in The Gospel of Orla. Its wholly convincing adolescent lead is neither hero, anti-hero, nor villain. The people she encounters are neither saints nor sinners, however we might mistake them for the same. This novel is exactly the sort of searching, truth-troubling story that Orla needs to read, that would surely stay with her."

The Dust Never Settles (2021)
Karina Lickorish Quinn
"Karina Lickorish Quinn has rendered on the page a person and a place in all their conflicted histories so convincingly and dizzyingly and singularly that the very ink haunts. It leaves a shadow text on the reader’s psyche. The Dust Never Settles is a marvelous, vertiginous work that mercilessly conveys the post-colonial state."

The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually (2020)
Helen Cullen
"Beautifully-observed [...] charts a family across 37 years, living through a tragedy on a remote island; portraying mental health and the fall-out around it with enormous humanity and integrity. Tonally reminiscent of recent Colm Tóibín."

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