Award-winning Irish author Danielle McLaughlin discusses her new novel, Rituals, with Bernie McGill.

Joan is in the habit of living alone, her days shaped by rituals and routines – some ordinary, some less so. When she takes in a lodger, they must learn to negotiate everything from a shared bathroom to the hazards of global warming.

Following her acclaimed short-story collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets and debut novel The Art of Falling, Rituals is a tender, funny book about an obsessive mind – and the bravery involved in opening our hearts to change.

Danielle McLaughlin’s short-story collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets was published in 2015 by The Stinging Fly Press. In 2019, she was a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient, and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. Her first novel, The Art of Falling, was published in 2021 by John Murray and was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2022.  In 2023 she was a recipient of a Markievicz Award. Her second novel, Rituals, is published by The Stinging Fly Press.

Bernie McGill is the 2023 winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her collection This Train is For. She is the author of two novels: The Watch House (nominated for the Ireland European Union Prize for Literature in 2019) and The Butterfly Cabinet (2010). Her short stories have been widely anthologised, and her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. Her first short story collection, Sleepwalkers (2013), was re-published in 2025 by No Alibis Press.

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