Country

Michael Hughes was born and raised in Keady, County Armagh, and his novel Country carries Homer's Iliad into south Armagh in 1996, during the IRA ceasefire of the mid 1990s. Before turning to fiction he studied English at Oxford, trained at the Lecoq school in Paris and spent years acting under the name Michael Colgan. This is his second novel, following The Countenance Divine, published by John Murray in 2016.

In Country Michael Hughes gives each figure from the Iliad a local counterpart. Achilles becomes Achill, an IRA sniper, Hector becomes Henry, an SAS man, and Helen and Patroclus become Nellie and Pat. The plot turns on a quarrel between Achill and his commander, Pig, after which Achill lays down his weapon as British forces led by an SAS officer plan against the unit.

Speaking to the Irish News, Hughes said the Iliad allowed him to write about the Troubles without exploiting the pain of real people whose families are still living. The Irish Echo reported that the book works both for readers who know Homer and, for those who don't, as a political thriller in its own right.

The novel won the 2018 London Hellenic Prize, given for a book related to or inspired by Hellenic culture, and was on the UK shortlist for the EU Prize for Literature in 2019. Matthew Wright of The Arts Desk wrote that "Hughes' greatest achievement is linguistic", though he felt the Homeric structure weighed on the ending. Suzi Feay in The Spectator found it ambitious and challenging but judged Hughes less even handed than Homer, while Kirkus Reviews thought it stayed too close to its source.

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