Now in its seventh year, the John McGahern Annual Book Prize is a £5,000 award for the best debut work of fiction — novel or short story collection — by an Irish writer, established by the University of Liverpool's Institute of Irish Studies to celebrate the memory of one of Ireland's greatest prose writers.
Born in 1934 and raised in the west of Ireland, McGahern wrote six novels and four short story collections, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Amongst Women. He was dismissed from his teaching post when his second novel The Dark was banned by the Irish Censorship Board in 1965, one of the last great causes célèbres of Irish literary censorship. He died in 2006.