Valentine’s Day 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Irish writer Val Mulkerns, and to celebrate, 451 Editions brings out a special edition of her first novel, A Time Outworn. It’s the story of Maeve, an unconventional young woman coming of age in post-Second World War Ireland. The New York Times praised it as “written in a cool and lovely prose”. The Irish Times called it “a sensitive, intelligent first novel”. This anniversary edition will have a foreword by Carlo G�bler, and an introduction drawn from Mulkerns’s late 1940s diaries, written by her daughter Maev Kennedy. Val Mulkerns went on to write ten more books, becoming a renowned voice in Irish literature, and a member of Aosd�na (The Affiliation of Creative Artists in Ireland). Her most recent publications were Memory and Desire (collected short stories) and an elegant memoir, Friends with the Enemy, (2017).

About the Author

Val Mulkerns was an Irish writer and member of Aosd�na. Her first novel, A Time Outworn, was released to critical acclaim in Ireland in 1951. She was associate editor and theatre critic for The Bell and later worked as a journalist and columnist and was often heard on the radio. She is the author of four novels, three collections of short stories, two children's books and many published essays and critical writings. Antiquities, her linked short story sequence, was a joint winner in 1984 of the AIB prize for literature. In 1953 she married Maurice Kennedy and they have two sons and a daughter. A third edition of her 1984 novel, The Summerhouse, was published in 2013, followed by a volume of her collected short stories, Memory and Desire in 2016. Her tenth title, the memoir Friends With The Enemy, came out a year later. She passed away in March, 2018. This special edition of her first book is published on the anniversary of her birth on 14 February, 1925.

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