Tadhg Coakley

Tadhg Coakley is from Cork. His debut novel, The First Sunday in September (2018), was shortlisted for the Mercier Press Fiction prize. His second, Whatever It Takes, was chosen as the 2020 Cork, One City One Book. Tadhg’s short stories, articles and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, and The Irish Times, and he writes about sport for the Irish Examiner.

Part memoir and part cultural dissection on our obsession with sport, The Game sees Tadhg Coakley push his work in a completely new direction as he manages to mix first hand stories of his time as a fan and a player with essays critiquing several aspects of sport. The result, is is an entertaining and thought-provoking meditation on the uniquely intense highs and lows of loving sport in today’s world. The Game looks at topics such as identity, toxic masculinity, homophobia, innocence and love and is described by Coakley himself as mixing sport with memoir the way Emilie Pine mixes memoir with the female body throughout Notes to Self.