Alan Murrin

Alan Murrin is an Irish writer based in Berlin. His debut novel, published in 2024, was shortlisted for the Peters Fraser Dunlop Queer Fiction Prize and was long-listed for the Caledonia New Novel Award 2022. In 2021 he was the winner of the Bournemouth Writing Prize for his short story The Wake, which went on to be shortlisted for short story of the year at the Irish Book Awards.

Alan is the recipient of an Irish Arts Council Agility Award and an Arts Council Literature Bursary. He is a graduate of the prose fiction masters at the University of East Anglia. His work was featured as part of the New Irish Writing series in the Irish Independent. He writes for The Irish Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator. His writing on art and photography has appeared in Art Review and The White Review.

Alan’s debut novel, The Coast Road, sold to Bloomsbury at auction, with further deals struck in the US (HarperVia at auction), Germany (pre-empted by DTV), and Italy (pre-empted by Mondadori). It was published in the UK in May 2024.

Set in County Donegal in 1994, the year before divorce became legal in Ireland, The Coast Road is a brilliantly observed debut novel about a closed community and the consequences of daring to move against the tide. Colette Crowley, the bohemian writer who left her husband and sons, enlists the help of a housewife named Izzy in attempt to reconcile with her children, and the two women forge a friendship that will send them on a spiralling journey – one toward a path of self-discovery, and the other toward tragedy.

You can watch Alan’s conversation with Colm Tóibín, talking all about the book, here.