Artistic Reactions To The 1981 Irish Hunger Strike - Fiction

Fiction

• Hunger Strike - Reflections on the 1981 Republican Hunger Strike, edited by Danny Morrison, was published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the hunger strike, and featured contributions, many of them specially commissioned, from well-known novelists and poets, former prisoners and activists.
• Everything in this country must by Colum McCann, published in 2006 features the novella "Hunger Strike" written from the perspective of a boy going through puberty at the same time as his uncle is in Long Kesh, taking part in a hunger strike. Asked why he had chosen to write about the hunger strike, he said "...as far as I know there has been no fictional examination of the wound that the Hunger Strikes left on all of us. Twenty years have passed, perhaps just long enough for us to begin to see this history a new light. I believe that fiction can capture the moment when the thorn enters the skin."
• The British/Irish novelist Marion Urch set her 1996 novel "Violent Shadows" (Headline Review 1996) in the year of the hunger strikes. The novel is included in many summaries of Troubles fiction including "Gangsters and Guerillas" Patrick Magee. 2001. It was also the subject of a PhD “Representing the Unnarratable -Feminist Terrorism” by Pamela Grieman (University of Southern California. 2010) An extract from the novel was shortlisted for the Irish Post short story competition in 1995. Adjudicator Patrick McCabe called it “powerful, it seems to document all the pain of Irish history in a few short pages.”