Megan Nolan (Ireland)

She was born in 1990, – an Irish writer based in New York. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation was published in 2021. It became an international bestseller and was translated into fourteen languages, including Georgian, translated by Nini Chakvetadze and published by Sulakauri Publishing in 2025.

Her second book, Ordinary Human Failings, was published in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Orwell prize for Political Fiction, the Nero Prize for Fiction, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize.

Megan Nolan is currently working on her first non-fiction book.

ACTS OF DESPERATION
(Exerpt from novel)

Is it possible to love someone without knowing them, by sight?
How can I describe what happened to me without the word love?
I stood in that gallery and felt not only sexual attraction (which I was aware of, dimly, as background noise) but what I can only describe as grave and troubling pity.
By this I don’t mean that I felt myself to be above him. For almost our entire life together I would consider Ciaran to be better than me in both essential and superficial ways.
By pity, what I mean is that just by looking at him I felt an acute tenderness for his condition: his being human. In that moment the basic affection and sorrow I feel for any human person was intensified to such a degree I could not breathe.
Even now, even after all that took place between us, I still can feel how moved I am by him. Ciaran was not the first beautiful man I slept with, or the first man I had obsessive feelings for, but he was the f irst man I worshipped. His body would become a site of prayer for me, a place where I could forget about my own living flesh and be only with his. It was a thing of total pleasure, total beauty.
Do you think I am unaware of calling his body a place, a thing? Do you think I am unaware of what it is to be a woman speaking this way about a man’s body? What do I know about the body of a man – and can any single one of them deserve or need a moment more of praise?
What must it feel like to be beautiful but also invisible whenever you choose to be? To be a beautiful man?