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Winner of the RTÉ Francis McManus Short Story Prize, Shane Tivenan is a remarkable new talent, whose debut collection simmers with style, verve, tension and humor.
Throughout the stories in To Avenge a Dead Glacier, Tivenan explores the lives of Irish outsiders -characters living marginalized lives beyond the perimeters of their communities. For many of these characters, to integrate would mean changing in ways they cannot allow themselves to. In one story an Irish woman is committed to a mental asylum for attempting to assassinate the Italian dictator, Mussolini, shortly before the Italians shoot him themselves. In another, a midlands graffiti artist, Dino Matcha, tries warning his townspeople through his throw-ups about the dangers of the way they are living, but neglects his own mind in the process. In the title story, a man mourns the loss and destruction of nature, and spends his days down a grassed laneway waiting for passers-by who he can try and convert to his way of seeing the world. A ninety-two-year-old woman suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome, and tries to celebrate her birthday in her nursing home in Elphin while fighting back the hallucinations brought on by her condition. A Donegal woman is ostracized from her family, has spent twenty years living homeless on the streets of Madrid, and is unsure of what to do when she is giving the possibility of a new home and love. These are stories rich in the essential detail of human life, in the fraught exchanges that make up our every relationship, and very often of life lived beyond the confines of safety or simplicity.Author Biography
Shane Tivenan grew up close to Athlone Town, County Roscommon. He studied Cultural Anthropology at Maynooth University. His fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. He was awarded the 2020 RTÉ Francis MacManus Prize, the 2024 John McGahern Award, and was selected for the Bridport Prize Anthology in 2023. His debut collection of short stories, To Avenge a Dead Glacier, will be published by The Lilliput Press in 2025.
Number of Pages: 265
Dimensions: 0.87 x 7.8 x 5.04 IN
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
