Exploring Oona: Alice Lyons

For any writer, especially those daring to venture into uncharted literary territories, this event is an exhilarating opportunity to embrace your creative instincts, push the boundaries of storytelling, and connect with fellow pioneers in the ever-evolving landscape of literature. 

Oona is an award winning work by Alice Lyons that traces the life and education of an artist, Oona, who moves from the United States to rural Ireland. 

Composed without using the letter O, this novel is particularly intriguing. It is a literary feat. “This is to say that the absence of an ‘o’ isn’t a gimmick: it’s the point. Just as Oona is estranged from herself, so too is the reader estranged from the language of the novel: a niggling sense of things being not quite right abides at the level of theme and form. There’s something voracious about the intellect behind this book; a joyfulness in the possibilities of language, even when it’s expressing something far from joyful’, so writes Tara McAvoy in The Stinging Fly.

Join our friends at Accidental to hear about Alice’s journey and process in developing this magical work.

Alice Lyons was born in Paterson, New Jersey. Her most recent publication is a work of prose, Oona (Lilliput, 2020). Alice is recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary awarded by Nuala Ní Dhomnaill, a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University and most recently, the inaugural Heaney-Miłosz Residency in Kraków, Poland. Alice lives in Sligo and lectures in writing at ATU Sligo.