Story of the Month, September 2023

"Frisch weht der Wind / Der Heimat zu, / Mein Irisch Kind". Is this what billows my sails? Is it anything to do with Prigozhin? No, it's the joy of reading a marvellous story about people and places and the lives lived today, in all their complex history and entanglements. (Ed.)

The Willesden Herald Story of the Month

September 2023: Fresh Blows the Wind Homeward by Jaki McCarrick

Emily stood at the window and looked down at the illuminated town. It was Saturday night and she could hear sirens.
“What is it?” Jo said.
“Police, I think. In the distance. Something must have happened.”
“Exactly,” Jo said, “in the distance. Come to bed.”
She looked eastwards, away from the passing police cars, and to where she could make out a cargo ship, inching its way across the Irish Sea. …

Jaki McCarrick is an award-winning writer of plays, poetry and fiction. Winner of the Papatango Prize for New Writing for her play Leopoldville, Jaki’s play Belfast Girls was developed at the National Theatre Studio, London and has been staged many times internationally. Shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the BBC Tony Doyle Award, Belfast Girls made its New York premiere at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2022, and opens in Buffalo, NY, in 2023. Her play The Naturalists premiered in New York in 2018.

Jaki McCarrick. Photo © Bobbie Hanvey

Jaki’s plays have been published by Samuel French, Routledge and Aurora Metro and have been translated into Swedish and French.

Her debut fiction collection The Scattering was shortlisted for the 2014 Edge Hill Prize and includes the Wasafiri Prize-winning story, “The Visit”. In 2020 Jaki was shortlisted for the An Post Book Awards Short Story of the Year Award (Ireland) for her short story ”The Emperor of Russia”. Jaki was Writer in Residence at the Centre Cultural Irlandais in Paris in 2013 and at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in 2022. She has written critical pieces for the Times Literary Supplement, The Irish Examiner, Poetry Ireland Review and other publications.

Longlisted in 2014 for the inaugural Irish Fiction Laureate, Jaki is currently working on a novel, a second collection of short stories and the screenplay of Belfast Girls.

Author: Stephen Moran

I was born in Dublin and made my way to London on a bike in my mid-twenties. It’s where I can still be found though ever further out, most recently as far as Harrow. I no longer own a bicycle.