Naoise Dolan

Naoise Dolan (born 1992) is an Irish novelist and journalist best known for her debut novel Exciting Times (2020), a dry, Austenian novel about an Irish woman teaching English in Hong Kong who becomes involved simultaneously with a British banker and a Hong Kong-born lawyer — a novel that was immediately compared to Sally Rooney's work and helped establish a new wave of Irish literary fiction by young women writing about intimacy, class, and money with ironic precision. Born in Dublin in 1992, she studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and, after graduating, taught English in Hong Kong as a language assistant — an experience she drew on directly for Exciting Times. The novel was published in 2020 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK and Ecco Press in the US, and became an immediate critical success, praised for the precision and restraint of its prose and for its refusal of emotional sentimentality; it was compared to Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde as well as to Rooney. Dolan has spoken openly about being influenced by Rooney — who is also a Trinity College Dublin alumna — while insisting on the distinctiveness of her own voice and concerns. Her second novel, The Happy Couple (2023), follows a Dublin couple in the period before their wedding, told in alternating perspectives, and was praised as a confirmation of the promise of her debut. Dolan also writes cultural criticism for publications including the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the New Statesman.