Kevin Barry (2016 Event)

Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone won the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize for ‘fiction at its most novel’. The phrase seems apt: even though this is a story built from familiar elements – an imagined John Lennon, post-Beatles in 1978, trying to pay a visit to an isle off the coast of Ireland that the real-life Lennon bought in the 60s – Barry has produced a tour de force that’s funny, raw and dazzlingly novel. In this hilarious event recorded live at the 2016 Edinburgh International Book Festival, he reads from the book before talking about where his ideas came from.