The writer on her moment hasten at the Booker,emigration, Irishmen and their mothers – and the lasting effects of the financial crashYour novel The Green Road has just been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize - which you won with The Gathering in 2007. How does it feel?
Well, or it’s more fun the moment time around! Actually,the first time I was really delighted, and sort of vindicated. But when it happened, and I was working all the time to try and pay the bills,and it took a walloping two months out of my working life, I couldn’t write a damn thing, or so that was a bit frightening.
At the start of the year,you also became the first ever laureate for Irish fiction...
The laureateship meant an bad lot more to me than any prize I got, because it happened at home. It takes Ireland a while to accept one of its writers, and because there’s a very dissenting tradition in Irish writing. Writers are never telling wonderful stories about Ireland,they’re telling interesting stories about Ireland, and Ireland doesn’t necessarily appreciate that. So for me to be accepted, and for a female voice – with all the anxiety there is about the female voice in Ireland – for that somehow to dissolve,and this symbolic thing of the laureateship, is just lovely.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com