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Keith Ridgway is one of the two award-winning Irish authors on this year’s Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. His mind-bending, uncompromising novels and stories push the conventions of narrative fiction to its limits. His debut novel, The Long Falling (1998), concerned itself with an English woman trapped in an abusive marriage in rural Ireland and won both the 2001 Prix Femina Etranger and Premier Roman Etranger; The Parts (2003), took Celtic Tiger Dublin as its setting, exploring the atomisation of urban life; Animals (2006), saw Ridgway’s gaze turn to London with a tale of mental disintegration; Hawthorn and Child (2012), dismantled the conventions of crime fiction.

Ridgway was born in Dublin. He now lives in south London, where he works as a creative writing teacher and writer. At the beginning of Dooneen, the protagonist, Mew, steps through the bushes of a London park and finds himself in an alternate reality – and an entirely different city.…