Garrett Carr
Born in 1975, Carr grew up in Killybegs, Donegal, where The Boy from the Sea (Picador, February), is set. The book begins in 1973, when a baby is found abandoned on the beach and adopted by a fisherman. From there, it spans two decades, exploring family, community, and a changing world.
What was the impetus behind The Boy from the Sea?
Many things drove it. One aim was to dig into the emotional lives of characters who have little understanding of their own emotional drives, who live by instinct and tradition and, in some cases, an innate sense of decency. But what happens when life demands self-understanding? I also wanted to write something that would make people laugh. It is not a comic novel but laughter is part of life and, above all, I wanted The Boy from the Sea to feel like life.
Tell me about the process of writing the novel
I lost a notebook in 2019, a tragedy at the time. After I’d completed The Boy from the Sea, it was miraculously returned to me. I was surprised to discover I’d at first written the story in the voice of the older brother. I had soon dropped that angle. The final novel is narrated by the entire town. This ties with the story: the abandoned baby is fated to be raised among them and does, in a sense, belong to everybody. At least that’s what they like to think.
You lecture in creative writing at Queen’s University. Has teaching influenced your writing?
The students are great to put up with me. What and how I teach varies a lot depending on my own writing and reading. They’re hearing a lot about Henry James at the moment. Some years ago, we were reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Our discussions discovered a rich vein that inspired The Boy from the Sea: a father’s need to explain himself to his son.
Róisín Lanigan
Belfast-native Lanigan lives and works in London, as an editor and writer. I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There (Fig Tree, March), draws on the haunted house novel to tell a story of the millennial rental crisis.
What inspired I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There?
Housing is a topic I wrote about anyway and was interested in, possibly because I was a journalist making no money and spending all my money on rent. But the inspiration mainly came from haunted houses. I was listening to a podcast about the Amityville Horror, the most successful ghost story of all time. [But] when you look at the context of it, all ghost stories and haunted house stories are basically about the horror of owning property and the financial burden of that. [I wondered] what is the equivalent for millennials, because most of us will probably never own property. That trope of not being able to leave the house – what if you could leave, but you would go into another house that you don’t know the history of, and be broke, and homeless in a different way.
[ Irish debut authors for 2023: Their own stories and the ones they made upOpens in new window ]
The title is a full sentence. What made you choose it?
I think the title sums up the feeling of the book – the “emotional homelessness” of young adulthood. You’re in a house and it’s not yours, and it’s not quite home. Often, I would go back to my flat at the end of the day of work, and I’d be like: I want to go home. But I was at home. And I would go back to my parents’ place, be standing in my childhood bedroom, and I’d be like, this isn’t my home either.
How do you feel about putting a novel into the world?
I’m very excited, but also quite scared. It’s the longest project I’ve ever taken on, and it’s probably the thing that I’m most proud of and the most passionate about. So, it feels very alien to me. Also, putting something into the world that you’ve made up in your own head is very different to, say, an interview with someone, where you can say “oh, they said these mad things, nothing to do with me!”. I have to take responsibility for all of this, which I’m very happy to do.
Elaine Garvey
Garvey, who hails from county Sligo, holds an M. Phil in creative writing from Trinity College Dublin, and has been publishing stories for more than two decades in outlets such as the Dublin Review and Winter Papers. The Wardrobe Department (Canongate, February), centres upon Mairéad, a dresser at West End theatre who returns to Ireland from London following her grandmother’s death.
What drew you to Mairéad’s story?
[In a Stinging Fly workshop with Seán O’Reilly], I was writing a story about teenage girls in a caravan park. I was sure that was my story, but it wasn’t working. Through Seán’s mentorship and working with the group, I realised that the story was in London with this character. But it took me six months to get there, to give her a name, a job, a place to live. There’s a scene where Mairéad is in a workroom and her boss comes in, and the caretaker comes in. That was the first scene I wrote, and the breakthrough for me in that I knew how to make a start from there.
You’ve received several bursaries and supports, including a Words Ireland mentorship with Danielle McLaughlin, and an Arts Council Agility Award. Have these had a big impact on your career?
Definitely. In November 2022, I got a second-round offer on the Basic Income for Artists, the pilot scheme that was set up mostly because of Covid, to try and help people get back on their feet. And that was fundamental. I don’t think the novel would be in the shape that it’s in if I hadn’t got a place on that. In fact, I’m sure it wouldn’t.
You’ve been writing for many years. How did it feel when you landed a two-book deal?
Very unexpected. I spend so much time sending work out and having it rejected that that’s what I was expecting, to be honest. When you’re making something, it’s 50/50 that it will probably be rejected. But you keep working. My agent, Eleanor Birne, was fantastic. She had explained to me beforehand that it could fall flat, or it could get picked up. But with timing and luck, it was a good experience.
Seán Farrell
Long-time literary editor Farrell has helped to shape many a manuscript, including the work of Nuala O’Connor, Adrian Duncan, and others. Now he turns in his own, with Frogs for Watchdogs (New Island, February), a love letter to blended families set in an isolated house in the Irish countryside, and told from the perspective of an imaginative young boy.
Tell me a bit about yourself and how you became a writer
I was born and brought up in Ireland. I left for a long time and now I’m back. I have always read a lot and that’s what brought me to writing. The reader is so complicit in the creative process that there’s a very fine line between who’s doing what, so I see writing as a natural response to reading. I’ve taken so much joy from books, and I suppose I wanted to contribute something to that infinite sum.
How did Frogs for Watchdogs come about?
In desperation, I was trying to write something without using a narrator of any kind, whether first, second or third person. This led me to a few thousand words of very impressionistic, slightly unhinged prose where the scene was a huge imposition and there was very little feeling of control. Reading it made me feel like a small child at the mercy of the world around them; baffled, slightly frightened and full of wonder. That’s how it started.
You have a strong literary background. Your father, Antony, is a publisher. Your wife, Elske, is an author. You have been an editor for some years. Has this influenced your writing?
There’s a huge difference between what comes in as a manuscript and what goes out as a book, and understanding this has been an enormous advantage. One of the hardest things about being a writer is dealing with your insatiable ego and being involved in publishing has definitely helped me get this almost under control. Elske’s highly critical, unblinking eye has certainly made me a better writer, and it’s really beneficial to live with someone who understands this process.
Catherine Airey
Born in 1993, Airey was raised in England, in a family of English-Irish descent. In 2021, she moved from London to Skibbereen (where her grandmother had been raised), and began to write. Confessions (Viking, January) begins when 16-year-old Cora becomes orphaned, after her father dies in the attack on the Twin Towers. Across continents and generations, it tells the story of an Irish-American family.
What was the germ cell for Confessions?
That’s a difficult one to answer, because I didn’t have one of those moments where you get a glittering idea. I started writing in spite of that, which was quite a nice way to do it. I could just follow whatever was interesting me at the time. Mostly that was forgotten bits of Irish history. Moving from a big city to a very rural community provided space for me to notice things more keenly, to be more curious about people and places.
Did it take a lot of research?
I loved the research aspect. September 11th was the first big world event that really captured me as a child. I wrote about it in my diary and was obsessed with watching the documentaries each anniversary. But mostly I’m interested in the stuff that isn’t in documentaries or history books – how the everyday human experience is affected by what’s going on in the world. For the Ireland bits, We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole was brilliant for context and I loved watching YouTube videos of the RTÉ series, Reeling in the Years. The internet in general was invaluable for looking up small details like what the weather was on a certain day, or what was showing at the cinema. I wanted the novel to fit into the real world.
It was acquired in a 24-hour, six-figure pre-empt in the UK and a hotly contested six-figure auction in the US. What was that like?
It’s all a bit of a blur. I remember I didn’t sleep at all for a few nights straight. There were a few weeks between the UK deal and the US one, where I had video calls with editors to discuss the book. The whole time I was writing, I’d never really imagined what the process afterwards would be like. The shift from working privately on a Word document to talking about it publicly as a book is still something I’m getting used to.
Liadán Ní Chuinn
Ní Chuinn was born in the north of Ireland in 1998. Their work has been published in the Stinging Fly, Granta, Tolka and elsewhere. The stories in their debut collection Every One Still Here (Stinging Fly, March) are unified by grief and what people do for each other, and have been compared to the work of Han Kang and Claire-Louise Bennett.
How did you get started as a writer?
I sent a story into the Stinging Fly. They didn’t accept it, but Danny Denton sent me a genuinely lovely message saying it’d been a close call and I should keep at it. I didn’t see it at the time, because I’m terrible at checking emails, but a few months later he messaged again, saying he’d like to use the story, and he connected me with Thomas Morris for some mentoring. I’m very grateful to them both.
How do you feel about publishing your first book, and the publicity that accompanies publication?
I would say that I’m proud of it and […] I’m grateful to everyone that has made it happen – Danny, Thomas, Tracy [Bohan, my agent], and Declan [Meade, publisher of the Stinging Fly] – but I don’t find it straightforward. What I try to keep in my mind is the feeling I had growing up, this constant beat of: why does nobody know? What I read in the media, what I heard on the TV, on the radio, it didn’t reflect anything about my home that I knew to be true. It’s only a few stories, and it’s only one collection, but I think I would have found relief in reading them as a young person, and I try to keep that in mind.
What does your writing practice look like?
I take practice to mean something that happens regularly, and I have to be honest in that I do not write regularly. I love it, but I have a couple of jobs and I work a lot. I’ve heard there are people that say, you have to make the time – if you start work at 7am, write from 5am until 6.45am – but I can’t do that. I love to write when I can get a day all on its own, and I don’t have to be anywhere or do anything else. Sometimes I can write a story in one sitting, if I can just have time to sit and put it together.
Dave Tynan
Tynan is the director of several short films, as well as the feature, Dublin Oldschool (2018). His debut short story collection, We Used to Dance Here (Granta, August), explores a Dublin in flux, with themes such as toxic masculinity, frustrated ambitions, and life on the fringes.
Louise Hegarty
Cork author Hegarty has published stories in Banshee, the Tangerine, the Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review, and had work broadcast on radio, and optioned for screen. Fair Play (Picador, April), a genre-bending locked-room mystery set in an Airbnb in the Irish countryside, has already sold rights in several languages.
Patrick Holloway
Fiction writer, poet, and editor of the literary journal, The Four Faced Liar, Holloway holds a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Glasgow and a PhD in creative writing from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The Language of Remembering (Époque, February) tells of a man who returns with his family from Brazil to Ireland. His mother, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s, has begun to speak the language of her youth, Irish.
Gráinne O’Hare
O’Hare lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, where she is completing a PhD on 18th-century women’s life writing. Thirst Trap (Picador, June) is set in her native Belfast, and follows three housemates whose friendship is on the brink of catastrophe as they grieve the tragic death of their friend.
Barbara Leahy
Cork-native Leahy was a winner of the 2023 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair for Rembrandt’s Promise (Eriu, March). Set in 1642 and following the relationship between an impoverished widow and the renowned painter, Rembrandt, this historical novel is based on a true story.
Seán Hewitt
Poet, memoirist and Rooney Prize winner Hewitt is by no means a novice, but in April, his much-anticipated debut novel Open, Heaven (Jonathan Cape), hits the shelves. In a remote village in the north of England, two teenage boys meet, and their lives are transformed by the other.
Claire Gleeson
Gleeson hails from Dublin, where she works as a GP. Show Me Where It Hurts (Sceptre, April) was a runner-up at the 2023 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and tells of Rachel, a mother to two young children, whose life is torn asunder owing to an unthinkable act by her husband, Tom.
Claire Anderson-Wheeler
Law-graduate, Anderson-Wheeler grew up in Dublin, Geneva and Brussels, and now lives in Boston, where she works in publishing. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. In The Gatsby Gambit (Renegade, April), the world of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic becomes the setting for an Agatha-Christie-style murder mystery.
Brendan Mac Evilly
Author of the non-fiction book At Swim and editor of the arts journal, Holy Show, MacEvilly has long been an active member of the Irish literary community. Deep Burn (Marrowbone, September), centres upon a photographer who develops an unlikely career by burning emotionally charged objects in picturesque settings and photographing them.
Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin
Irish writer Ní Mhaoileoin lives in Edinburgh and has published work in Gutter, the New Statesman, the Millions and elsewhere. Ordinary Saints (Manilla, April) won the inaugural PFD Queer Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize Trust Discoveries award. It tells the story of a queer Irish woman who finds out that her dead brother may become a Catholic saint.
Rose Keating
Waterford writer Keating has published in Banshee, Southword, and elsewhere, and was a recipient of the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship for her master’s degree in prose fiction at the University of East Anglia. Her debut short story collection, Oddbody (Canongate, July), blends literary horror and gothic to delve into uncomfortable and taboo aspects of the feminine experience.
Gethan Dick
Writer and visual artist Dick was born in Belfast, grew up in the west of Ireland, and currently lives in France. In Water in the Desert Fire in the Night (Tramp, May), an underachieving millennial, a retired midwife, and a charismatic Dubliner set off on a cycle from London to the Southern Alps, after the end of the world.
