Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year

Shortlist 2023

The Celestial Realm

The Celestial Realm

By Molly Hennigan

“Phil doesn’t like physical affection. She doesn’t love you because you don’t exist. She doesn’t care if you have something important coming up. A busy week, a daunting appointment, a divorce, because she believes the world is going to end in the morning. Every morning.”

Having grown up visiting her grandmother in various psychiatric hospitals, Molly Hennigan began writing about the gaps in and intimacies of her relationship with this matriarch. Tracing the organic path of her grandmother’s experience to her great-grandmother’s time in Irish mental hospitals, she explores her own family trauma and what it means to be an unconventional woman in a society that values conformity.

About Molly Hennigan...

Molly Hennigan was born in 1994 in Dublin. Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Tolka and The Pig’s Back. She lives in Galway. This is her first collection of essays.

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