Sligo author and ATU graduate launches debut novel

September 15, 2025

A Sligo-based author and Atlantic Technological University graduate is preparing for the launch of her debut novel – and gaining lavish praise ahead of publication from senior authors including Anne Enright and Elaine Feeney.

A Sligo-based author and Atlantic Technological University (ATU) graduate is preparing for the launch of her debut novel – and gaining lavish praise ahead of publication from senior authors including Anne Enright and Elaine Feeney.

Sugarland by Caragh Maxwell is published by Oneworld Publications on 18 September. It tells the story of a young Irishwoman’s chaotic return home from London, and is expected to be one of the autumn’s major literary debuts. Anne Enright has praised its “rawness, candour and humour” while Elaine Feeney has described it as a “very real and penetrating account of modern Ireland”.

Caragh Maxwell grew up in Mullingar and moved to Sligo in her early twenties to study on the undergraduate Writing and Literature programme at ATU Sligo.

“I don’t know what I expected when I started the degree,” she says. “I think I knew I was good at writing and I wasn’t good at anything else. I’d liked writing as a child; I was always telling little stories, and it was always with me that way. I’d gone to Maynooth briefly when I was 19 and dropped out, and I’d just been wandering the earth since then.”

But her promise as a writer was obvious to ATU staff from the outset. Novelist and lecturer Elske Rahill taught Maxwell in the final year of her undergraduate degree. “She stood out immediately for her talent and drive, even on a course with a strong track record for graduate success,” Rahill says.

Maxwell had already signed with high-profile literary agent Peter Straus by the time she graduated in 2021. She went on to postgraduate study at Trinity College Dublin – commuting from Sligo via her mother’s home in Mullingar for classes. But she says that her eventual publishing success never felt inevitable.

“I loved every minute of college,” she says; “but with the novel itself, when I actually had to sit down and write the bloody thing, it felt like the worst thing in the world. When you have to deliver something, you’d rather just clean the house or walk the dog! But looking back now I realise I’m so privileged to have been able to dedicate so much time in my life to creating things, and then to have people actually like the things I’ve created.”

Maxwell went through an experience common to many now-famous novelists, as the book was initially turned down by commissioning editors before finding a home at Oneworld, which also publishes Man Booker Prize-winners Marlon James and Paul Beatty.

“I didn’t think it was going to happen for a while,” she says; “I got something like 42 rejections. But I think it was good for me, thinking it wasn’t going to happen and having to pick myself up and get on with things.”

But once the book was signed by Oneworld, and advance copies began to circulate amongst established authors, the plaudits flooded in, with the publisher expecting it to appeal to fans of Sally Rooney and Megan Nolan.

Fellow Sligo-based novelist Una Mannion has called Sugartown “utterly compelling, authentic and raw”.

“Caragh Maxwell’s voice is one we should be hearing,” Mannion says.

The Sligo launch of Sugartown is at Liber Bookshop on O’Connell Street at 5.30pm on Thursday 18 September, with further events nationwide to follow.