Danielle McLaughlin’s debut collection of short stories. ‘Dinosaurs On Other Planets’ was one of my top six mainstream reads of 2018. It was one of those rare collections where all the stories were strong and the themes and types of people that they covered were diverse. What bound them together was clear, simple but beautiful writing and an insight into people that was acute and dispassionate to the point of fatalism. 

I was delighted to see that a new short story by Danielle McLaughlin, ‘Snow Globe’ was published in the Irish Times. It’s a wonderful story that manages to take a tilt at the nature and purpose of public art, homelessness in Ireland and the absurdities of the property market while remaining a very human story about the woman who makes the art while dealing with the aftermath of her divorce and looking after her child.

Here’s an extract to give you a flavour. It covers the immediate reaction to the unveiling of ‘Elysium’, the piece of art the artist had been commissioned to produce:

The Lord Mayor performed the ribbon-cutting ceremony while a string quartet played Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, and I gazed at my Elysium and thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever made. Within an hour, a taxi driver had phoned a radio show and christened it the “Snow Globe”. Other people called it a dazzling re-imagining of the architecture of urban space; a blight on the landscape; a manifesto for our times; a waste of public funds; an anthropomorphic rewriting of the nativity trope; an appropriation of the misery of others. It was alleged to have been funded by Elon Musk, George Soros and Dolly Parton. I couldn’t have been prouder.’

You can read the whole story HERE

Danielle McLaughlin’s debut novel, ‘The Art Of Falling’ was published on 9th January 2021.