 Hardcover edition | |
| Author | Paul Murray |
|---|---|
| Country | Ireland |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Hamish Hamilton |
Publication date | 4 February 2010 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 672 pp (hardback) |
| ISBN | 978-0-241-14182-3 |
| Preceded by | An Evening of Long Goodbyes |
Skippy Dies is a 2010 tragicomic novel by Paul Murray. It was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Book Awards, longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, [1] and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. [2]
Skippy Dies follows the lives of a group of students and faculty members at the fictional Seabrook College, a Catholic boarding school in Dublin. The title character, Daniel "Skippy" Juster, dies during a donut-eating contest in the novel's opening scene. The rest of the novel explores the events leading up to Skippy's death, as well as the aftermath within the Seabrook community.
The novel began as a short story, concerning a pupil and a teacher, but it quickly outgrew this as Murray created further characters. A later draft of the novel ran to a thousand pages, though Murray culled much of this before publication. [3] The Seabrook College of the book is based on Blackrock College, Murray's old secondary school.
Skippy Dies received almost universally positive reviews, with most reviewers commenting on the mixture of comic and tragic writing and the novel's large scope. [4] The book was included in Time's list of the ten best books of 2010, ranked at number three. British Prime Minister David Cameron was reported to be reading the book during his 2011 summer holidays in Spain. [5] The book was also nominated for the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction [6] and for the 2010 Irish Book Awards Irish Novel of the Year. [7] In 2011, it was nominated for the 2012 International Dublin Literary Award. [8]
Jonathan Coe is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! (1994) reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources that was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s.
Peter Warren Finlay, also known as DBC Pierre, is an Australian author who wrote the novel Vernon God Little.
John O'Farrell is a British author, comedy scriptwriter, and political campaigner. Previously a lead writer for such shows as Spitting Image and Have I Got News for You, he is now best known as a comic author for such books such as The Man Who Forgot His Wife and An Utterly Impartial History of Britain. He is one of a small number of British writers to have achieved best-seller status with both fiction and nonfiction. He has also published three collections of his weekly column for The Guardian and set up Britain's first daily satirical news website NewsBiscuit. With comedian Angela Barnes, he co-hosts the light-hearted historical podcast We Are History.
Helen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirty-something singleton in London trying to make sense of life and love. Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) were published in 40 countries and sold more than 15 million copies. The two films of the same name achieved international success. In a survey conducted by The Guardian newspaper, Bridget Jones's Diary was named as one of the ten novels that best defined the 20th century.
Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award for his 2003 novel The Known World.
Geoff Dyer is an English author. He has written a number of novels and non-fiction books, some of which have won literary awards.
Howard Eric Jacobson is a British novelist and journalist. He is known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. He is a Man Booker Prize winner.
Marina Lewycka is a British novelist of Ukrainian origin.
Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Paul Murray is an Irish novelist, the author of the novels An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies, The Mark and the Void, and The Bee Sting.
Canongate Books is an independent publishing firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is the United Kingdom's first literary award for comic literature. Established in 2000 and named in honour of P. G. Wodehouse, past winners include Paul Torday in 2007 with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and Marina Lewycka with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian 2005 and Jasper Fforde for The Well of Lost Plots in 2004. Gary Shteyngart was the first American winner in 2011.
Paul Torday was a British writer and the author of the comic novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. The book was the winner of the 2007 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and was serialised on BBC Radio 4. It won the Waverton Good Read Award in 2008. It was made into feature film in 2011, starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt.
Lloyd Jones is a poet, novelist and photographer. In 2002 he became the first person to walk completely around Wales, a journey of a thousand miles.
Manu Joseph is an Indian journalist and writer. He is the former editor of Open magazine.
Tariq Goddard is a British novelist and publisher. He has written seven novels, the first of which Homage to a Firing Squad, was short-listed for the Whitbread Book Award for First Novel. His first three novels were published by Sceptre. In 2007, he founded the independent publishing company, Zero Books, and is now the publisher of Repeater Books.
Nina Stibbe is a British writer born in Willoughby Waterleys and raised in Fleckney, Leicestershire. She became a nanny in the household of Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books. Her letters home to her sister became her first book, Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life, which was adapted into the 2016 BBC television series, Love, Nina.
Serious Men is a 2010 drama fiction novel written by journalist Manu Joseph. The story follows Ayyan Mani, a middle-aged Dalit working as an assistant to a Brahmin astronomer at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai. He lives in a slum with his wife and a son. Furious at his situation in life, Ayyan develops an outrageous story that his 10-year-old son is a mathematical genius – a lie which later gets out of control.
Guy Kennaway is an English writer specialising in memoir and comic novels. He is represented by Mark Stanton at the North Literary Agency. In 2021 he won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for his comic fiction The Accidental Collector.
The Comedy Women in Print Prize is a literary award for comedy novels written by women. It was founded in 2018 by Helen Lederer in response to the low number of women awarded the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, having only been presented to three women in 18 years. However, Lederer has been careful not to describe the prize in critical terms. She also acknowledges that her status as a well-known comedian has helped draw focus onto the award.