Naoise Dolan

Naoise Dolan (born 1992 in Dublin) is an Irish novelist whose debut Exciting Times (2020) established her as one of the most distinctive new voices in millennial literary fiction. The novel — about a young Irish woman teaching English in Hong Kong who becomes entangled with both a wealthy British banker and a Hong Kong-born lawyer — is a sharp, formally controlled examination of class, desire, and the postcolonial dynamics embedded in language itself. Dolan writes about power with a precision that has drawn inevitable comparisons to Sally Rooney, though her sensibility is drier, more ironic, and more attuned to the way nationality, accent, and linguistic competence function as currencies in the global economy of desire.

Life and Career

Dolan grew up in Dublin and studied English at Trinity College Dublin, followed by a master’s degree at Oxford. She has spoken publicly about being diagnosed with autism, and her fiction’s attentiveness to the gap between social performance and interior experience — the way her characters constantly calculate how they are being perceived — reflects an unusually acute awareness of the mechanics of social interaction.

Exciting Times (2020, Weidenfeld & Nicolson) follows Ava, a twenty-something Irish woman who has moved to Hong Kong to teach English to children of the city’s financial elite. She begins an affair with Julian, a British banker who lends her his apartment when he travels, and then falls for Edith, a Hong Kong-born barrister educated in London. The triangle is structured around power differentials — economic, racial, gendered, colonial — that Ava observes with relentless, self-lacerating intelligence but cannot resolve. The novel’s voice — clipped, epigrammatic, always performing a kind of knowingness that barely conceals panic — captures the particular register of a generation that understands systemic critique perfectly and applies it to every situation except its own emotional life.

The novel was critically acclaimed, became a bestseller in Ireland and the UK, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was published in over twenty countries and optioned for television adaptation.

The Happy Couple (2023, Weidenfeld & Nicolson) followed Celine and Luke, a couple in Dublin preparing for their wedding while each privately questioning whether the marriage is what they want. The novel expands Dolan’s scope to a broader social canvas — the couple’s friends, families, and ex-partners are each given perspective chapters — while maintaining her characteristic attention to the micro-dynamics of power, resentment, and desire within intimate relationships.

Major Works and Themes

Dolan’s fiction is fundamentally about the performance of the self in situations where the power dynamics are unstable. Ava in Exciting Times is always calculating — how much rent she can afford to feel indebted for, what her Irish accent signifies in a room of British and Chinese speakers, whether her attraction to Edith is genuine desire or a strategic reorientation toward a more equitable relationship. This relentless self-monitoring is both the comedy and the tragedy of the novel: Ava’s intelligence, which should liberate her, instead traps her in an infinite regress of analysis.

Language is a central concern. Ava teaches English — the language of empire, exported to Hong Kong by the British and now sold back to the global elite as cultural capital. Her own relationship to English is complicated by her Irishness: she speaks the coloniser’s language natively but as a colonised subject. Dolan mines this condition for comedy and pathos without ever becoming didactic.

She writes with particular acuity about millennial economic precarity — the gig economy of language teaching, the dependence on wealthy partners for housing, the way financial vulnerability shapes romantic choices — and about the specific textures of queer desire in a social world that has normalised it in theory but not in emotional practice.

Key Works

• Exciting Times (2020)
• The Happy Couple (2023)

Collecting Dolan

Naoise Dolan is early in her career, and collecting her work is primarily a bet on her future trajectory — a reasonable one given the quality and reception of the debut. Exciting Times (2020, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London) is the UK first edition and the true first; fine copies bring $20–$50, with signed copies commanding $40–$100. The US edition (Ecco/HarperCollins) follows and is collected separately. The novel was published into a crowded literary market shaped by the Sally Rooney phenomenon, and first editions are relatively available, but signed copies are less common — Dolan does not sign prolifically. The Happy Couple (2023, Weidenfeld & Nicolson) first editions bring $15–$35. Proof copies of the debut, particularly UK proofs, would be of interest to collectors of contemporary Irish fiction.