The Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award 2008 emphatically gives the lie to this notion. The "senior" award in the Irish Book Awards, the shortlist features four outstanding novels, which demonstrate that our literary culture is thriving: Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls, his hugely ambitious novel charting the progress of our ancestors in America just after the Civil War; Ronan Bennett's Zugzwang, a gripping literary thriller set in St Petersburg; Anne Enright's Booker Prize-winning The Gathering, a tour-de-force of literary quality and a searing portrait of family life in all its glory; and Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan, about which Tim Rutten in the LA Times urged: "Go directly home. If you live with others, send them away. Pour yourself a quiet drink and settle into your best chair for an authentic dose of Irish angst and wit, wondrous writing and about as undiluted an evening's pleasure as reading can provide."

Clearly, this shortlist demonstrates not a literary culture in decline, but, perhaps, the continuing pre- eminence of a particular generation of Irish writers. Undoubtedly, this was a golden generation, writing in the Eighties and Nineties, whose work was sought after and admired over the water like never before, and who had the good fortune to be able to write about a more catholic, with a small "c", Ireland than their literary forbears.

Standard-bearers for literary quality and ambition, their imaginations allowed them to go far beyond this country. Joseph O'Connor moved from sparkily original tales of suburban life to the revolution in Nicaragua in the Eighties, and on to the epic story of our emigration to a New World; Ronan Bennett has made his name as a writer of skilful literary thrillers set in the Congo, as in The Catastrophist, or even in the Plague, as in Havoc, In Its Third Year. Others have reinterpreted key times in Ireland's history, as Benjamin Black has the muffled stagnation of Dublin of the Fifties, and Anne Enright does so vividly for the hopeful certainties of the Seventies generation.

Whereas writers such as John McGahern and Edna O'Brien, like Joyce -- who his friend Padraic Colum said was "glad he had left Dublin; he was glad to be away from a place where 'the reformed conscience' had left its fetter" -- were able to write almost in spite of, rather than because of, where they had been born, the later generation of writers were subject to less strictures, and could write about a country that was emerging from the Dark Ages.

Roddy Doyle and Dermot Bolger were both able to explore different aspects of their native Dublin, albeit in entirely different ways, from the tragicomedy of The Snapper and Paddy Clark Ha, Ha, Ha, to Bolger's searing The Journey Home, a gritty morality tale set in Dublin's social underworld; John Banville, Benjamin Black's alter ego, was able to travel to Europe in the middle ages for his "European" novels, Dr Copernicus and Kepler, and a later Europe was embraced in the tightly-written, early novels of Hugo Hamilton such as Surrogate City and The Last Shot. And in the north, Eoin MacNamee's explosive Resurrection Man, was, his editor Clare Reihill describes it, "like Ulysses for that generation."

Still later, Keith Ridgway would broaden the scope of what we could say as Irish people with his novel The Long Falling and the risky and provocative, Animals, and Sebastian Barry would reclaim an older conflict with our larger neighbour with his novel A Long Long Way, about the generation of Irish men who fought during the First World War and during 1916.

Interestingly, there were rather fewer women in this golden generation, with Anne Enright being the almost sole standard-bearer with her wickedly wry tales in The Wig My Father Wore, which seemed to defy pigeonholing. In a Guardian interview, Susanna Rustin posited that Enright's writing was difficult to classify "in part this is deliberate, a sign of her originality, but it is also because she belongs to a generation of Irish writers ... who are mostly men". It would seem that, with the exception of Enright, Mary Morrissy, the late Clare Boylan and Emma Donoghue, Irish women literary writers had yet to find their confident voice, veering off in the direction of the more commercial genres, which, in itself, is quite another story.

There is now, however, a new generation of Irish women writers to follow Enright's example, such as Julia Kelly with her debut, With My Lazy Eye, Karen Ardiff with The Secret of My Face, Claire Keegan, whose second collection, Walk the Blue Fields received the same breathless praise as her first, Antarctica, and Claire Kilroy with her ambitious, vivid imagination on the subject of genius in Tenderwire.

But does the 2008 shortlist demonstrate that, perhaps, it is more difficult for literary writers than before? Certainly, it used to be possible in Ireland to scratch a living while writing novels -- which today it isn't, with a rabbit hutch in Dunshaughlin costing the GDP of a small country. It's no coincidence that Philip O Ceallaigh wrote his distinctive Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse from Bucharest, where he probably wouldn't be charged €6.50 for a cheese sandwich. In his Arts Lives profile on RTE One, John Banville spoke about cutting his teeth as a sub-editor on the Irish Press, which he spoke of as an apprenticeship in writing. Writers no longer have that luxury.

And, rather like the plethora of superb Irish bands at the moment who remain unsigned by record labels, writers are finding the UK harsher terrain than formerly, possibly because we have less romantic appeal: we are driving bigger cars than they are and buying up half the Algarve -- hardly the impoverished neighbour of yore, with a charming gift of the gab and a whiff of danger about us. But this is nothing new. Legend has it that Neil Jordan's watershed collection Night in Tunisia sold a grand total of one copy in London when it was first published in 1976. And while it's true that the phones of the Irish literati are no longer ringing off the hook with enquiries from British publishers about "what's happening over there", there is still an interest in our writing. The excitement among UK publishers about Julia Kelly's vivid and original debut With My Lazy Eye would seem to confirm the continued interest in Irish literary writing. Nonetheless, we have to accept that the interests of the new generation of creative Irish people will not purely be literary ones. Perhaps Mark O'Halloran and Lenny Abrahamson's collaboration on Garage and Prosperity might have emerged as a novel 20 years ago, and Eugene O'Brien's Eden would not have been made into a TV drama.

There are, however, still plenty of new and intriguing literary talents emerging: along with the aforementioned Julia Kelly, Kevin Barry, shortlisted in the Best Irish Newcomer category of these awards for his debut collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, Philip O Ceallaigh and Chris Binchy, who is interested in the new, uncharted Ireland or David Park's new novel, The Truth Commissioner, in which the Troubles are reinterpreted in an entirely new and unforgettable way.

So, in spite of all the rumours of its demise, what the 2008 list tells us is that we should celebrate this extraordinary generation, revere its writing and see it as an example for others. The Hughes & Hughes Novel of the Year Award is proof that our literary tradition is alive and well.