This chapter addresses the history, evolution, and status of Irish texts for young people as well as trajectories of Irish publishing of youth literature. The significance of Irish children’s literature and the importance of a national literature produced by Irish authors for young Irish readers have been increasingly recognised and confirmed over the last four decades, for example by the establishment of the Children’s Literature Association of Ireland in the 1980s and the creation of Laureate na nÓg in 2010. Since the turn of the millennium, the emergence and commercial success of Irish young adult (YA) fiction and its exploration of adolescent turbulence have extended the imaginative territories addressed by Irish youth literature. The momentum of YA fiction has generated valuable opportunities for considering how youth is positioned within Irish society. This chapter considers what these contemporary works tell us about childhood and young adulthood from an Irish perspective.

More than sixty years after its initial publication in Irish, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s epic novel Cré na Cille appeared in an English translation: two of them, in fact – each published within a year of the other and by the same publisher, Yale University Press. This chapter takes this unusual circumstance as a stimulus to investigate the wider literary landscape and to give a nuanced overview of pertinent issues and emerging trends in Irish-language literature. Special attention is given to the role of translation, both to and from Irish, in the publication, mediation, and reception of Irish-language literature. Although much is often made of the literary afterlives of Irish-language texts in English, the author contends that these issues are best examined and understood in a multilingual context.