About me
Ruth McKee
My debut novel, Wild Iris, will be published in May 2026 by Dedalus Books.Wild Iris
Dedalus, 29 May, £11.99, PB, 9781915568953I'm the editor of Books Ireland and the host of the Burning Books podcast. I'm also the editor of The Irish Writers Handbook.My short fiction has been selected for New Irish Writing, and I've been twice-shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards. I was a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair.I have a PhD in Italian and Irish Literature from Trinity College Dublin.
Publishing 29 May 2026
Wild Iris (Dedalus)
"Wild Iris is wonderfully inventive, by turns grim as a Belfast Sunday and raucous as a Dublin Saturday night. Ruth McKee writes with dash and daring, and the result is a funny, moving and vastly entertaining novel. Chapeau!"—John Banville"Wild Iris is an accomplished and utterly captivating novel. It's a deeply moving and visceral read, rich in language, metaphor and detail yet also heartbreakingly humane. McKee has drawn a vivid and unsettling portrait of a woman tottering on the edge of herself." —Jan Carson'Wid Iris is a delight of a novel. Ruth McKee gifts us the troubled and fully-realised universe of Eve’s life – filled with luminous detail and a voice that is tender and intimate and pitch perfect. A beautifully written debut.'—Catherine Dunne“All good writers command the speed at which they write and we read. It takes remarkable skill indeed to fully engage the reader with the story of a woman calmly reliving her life, in minute and unsparing forensic detail, before she chooses to take her leave. To hold us in profound sympathy with the despair of the main character, and at one and the same time to paint a picture of a world rich in joy and beauty, that's a remarkable thing in itself. McKee's very considerable achievement is to make us read on, knowing full well how it's all going to end, to bind us fully into a story whose ending is inevitable, to hold our attention, enthralled and appalled, right down to the final full stop.”— Theo Dorgan
Wild Iris
A taut, enthralling narrative from an original new voice in Irish literary fiction which asks questions about language and being, death and the divine. It will appeal to readers of Claire Keegan, Sebastian Barry and John McGahern.Wild Iris—The Irish Times list of best fiction coming in 2026Wild Iris—The Independent list of 'buzzy debuts for 2026'Set over an Easter weekend, Wild Iris follows Eve as she enters a psychological crisis: will she reconnect with an old lover, or end her life? We stay with Eve over the course of a day—her 42nd birthday—and into the night, as the past seeps into the present.As a child Eve is anxious and lonely, but with a rich interior world, fascinated by language. Raised by Gerty, a strict, taciturn Presbyterian, only adds to her feeling of being out of place: everyone seems to have a template for living but her. Then she meets Louise and their intense friendship lasts into university, when Johnny arrives on the scene and splinters their trust. At Eve’s 21st birthday party, home from a night of drinking and drugs, a tragedy happens that will shape the rest of Eve’s life...
