Big distinction for young Claremorris writer

YOUNG Claremorris writer Elizabeth (EM) Reapy captured The Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year for her book, Red Dirt, at last night's Bord Gáis Irish Book of the Year awards.

A daughter of Joe and Helen Reapy, she has an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast.

Her short fiction and poetry has been published nationally and internationally and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

She was chosen as Tyrone Guthrie’s Exchange Irish Writer in Varuna Writers’ House, Sydney, for 2012 and awarded the Arts Council of Ireland’s Travel and Training Award.

The recording of her short story ‘Getting Better’ went to No. 1 in both the Irish and Global Literature Podcasts Charts on iTunes in May, 2012.

She was a featured speaker at the Australian Young Writers Festival, at the Dromineer Literary Festival, the Dublin Book Festival and the Belfast Book Festival.

A past pupil of Meelickmore NS and Mount St. Michael Secondary School, Claremorris, she was a teacher in England for a year before turning to writing as her profession.

Red Dirt tells the story of three young Irish people who came to Australia, running from the economic ruins of their home country and their own unhappy lives.

In this promised land, stunned by the heat and the vast arid space of the interior, they each try to escape their past in a chaotic world of backpacker hostels, huge fruit farms and squalid factories, surrounded by new friends who are even more damaged and dangerous than they are themselves.

Endless supplies of cheap drink and drugs loosen what little sense of responsibility they have, and a spiral of self-destructive behaviour forces each of them to face up to the reality of their lives.