The gangster life of Ryan

Lisa McInerney found a brilliant way to turn heads and hone her craft as the
‘Sweary Lady’ behind the ‘Arse End of Ireland’ blog. Taking a gonzo approach to the life she knew — first a council estate in Co. Galway, then a selection of much nicer houses in Cork — she let rip as an ‘amplified, wittier, crankier version of myself’. She took that mood of wild pace and confidence into her first novel, The Glorious Heresies, and it paid off. Her boisterous tale of Munster drug dealers, nailed as ‘Trainspotting with a heart’ by online magazine The Pool, won both the Baileys Prize for women’s fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novels.

When critics repeatedly commented on the ‘maleness’ of both her prose and her subject matter, she bit back on her website, concerned that these poor misguided souls might think ‘women are best suited to gentle pursuits, like embroidery’.