I'm nominated for an award and need a favour

The Irish Book Awards is part-decided by public vote

Look, I’ll be blunt. I’m really not much of a self-publicist and writing stuff like this isn’t a natural instinct for me.

But.

The Secret Life of Leinster House - which I haven’t even written about on this Substack, such is my poor self-publicisation - is shortlisted for Non-Fiction Book of the Year at this year’s Irish Book Awards.

The final decision is partly decided by a jury, and partly by public vote… and it’s on the latter that I’m asking for your help.

The public vote is available at irishbookawards.ie/vote and closes this Sunday, November 16th. The Non-Fiction category is the 11th one you’ll see - you can vote in as many or few categories as you like, but if you want to skip any category you can just hit the ‘OK’ button or the down arrow it’ll scroll to the next one.

I guess while I’m here, and mentioning the book, I should also say…

• The audiobook edition of The Secret Life of Leinster House has now been recorded and should be available in a few weeks; I’ll mention it here again.

• I’ve also contributed a chapter to The Taoiseach: A Century of Political Leadership, which is an anthology of essays about the 16 men who have been the head of an independent Irish government. I’ve written the chapter on Micheal Martin, which was kindly singled out for a nice mention in Saturday’s Irish Independent. The book was edited by Iain Dale (yes, the one from LBC … yes, a Briton!) who had already hosted a podcast series on the same strain, and whose Britishness-editing-a-book-about-Irishmen has already been a talking point.