Author Paul D Gibson revealed yesterday the depth of the difficulty he had in getting his warts-and-all biography of troubled Belfast boxer Eamonn Magee published.

Mercier Press finally took it on and Gibson, then a freelance writer who has since taken on a full-time job in the commercial side of professional boxing, said he had been willing to publish it himself if necessary.

“It’s depressing, more for the state of the publishing industry,” he said of the litany of rejection letters he received.

“A few said Eamonn was an unsympathetic character so it wouldn’t sell. One said I was too close to the subject and that hurt the writing, which you take on the chin.

“The others said it was an unbelievable story and very well written. Two or three put in their rejection letters that ‘we’ll see it in short lists next year, but it’s not for us.’”

That proved to be prophetic because the book was also the joint winner of the equivalent British award this year.

It is an absorbing, sometimes excruciatingly violent biography of a volatile, unapologetic man for whom the boxing ring was often the safest space for himself and his loved ones and is also a vivid social and political history.

Magee revealed yesterday that he had refused several previous efforts at collaboration, despite considerable financial inducements.

“They weren’t going to write it how I wanted. It’s not a story, it’s the truth, and that’s what I wanted. Paul worded it all correctly without making me feel as badly as I should,” he said, admitting that he found the final draft particularly difficult to read.

“As I was reading, all I could see on the left hand side of my chair was hankies. I was crying, crying, crying.”

Magee won a World junior medal for Ireland as an amateur but missed out going to the Barcelona Olympics because he wouldn’t agree to a box-off.

He was regarded as the most gifted of a Belfast family of particularly talented boxers who grew up in the nationalist stronghold of Ardoyne, a sectarian tinderbox in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As a professional he won a WBU Welterweight world title despite his turbulent personal history that includes being kidnapped, shot, multiple addictions, prison, and the violent death of his son.

“Boxers naturally provide great human stories, they’re characters who need to sell their personalities to a certain extent, so they’re naturally much more open,” Gibson said. “I knew I would get the truth out of Eamonn and I knew the truth hadn’t been told about him.

“A lot of sporting books are rags to riches stories, where it’s a footballer who grew up in a tough working estate and their dad left and they become a famous player.

“Where Eamonn grew up, and when he grew up, is a whole new level to that sort of story. It was important to me, being from Belfast, to show people, particularly non-Irish people who don’t get it at all, that this was on a completely different level.”

The previous winners of the eir Sport book award were all GAA-related; John Leonard’s Dub Sub Confidential (2015), Kieran Donaghy’s What Do You Think of That? (2016) and Philly McMahon’s The Choice last year, which was also co-written by Andy Lee’s collaborator Niall Kelly.

The judging panel comprised of eight Irish sports journalists covering print, broadcast, television, and online.

The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee was also the joint winner of Britain’s sports book of the year, which it shared with A Boy in the Water, Tom Gregory’s memoir of becoming the youngest person to swim the Channel in 1988, when he was just 11.