Some years ago – it must have been the mid-eighties – Paula Meehan and I were invited to read in Donegal (Ramelton, I think). Our host brought us to the top of a beautiful stone building where there was a roaring fire, and into a back room where we were invited to drink a fine, [...]
When I published my last novel, The Fisher Child in November 2000, the omens seemed good. It sold a stack of copies at the launch, it had a number of nice reviews, including in the TLS, and then… It was published on the 14th of November, a date etched on my mind, and despite the [...]
Just about a year ago, Patrick Chapman and I set up an experiment called Irish Literary Revival. As we put it in our introduction, This is where out-of-print and out-of-circulation Irish books are brought back into the world. Although our name is a pun, our intentions are serious. Would that we both had more time [...]
Years ago, when times were simpler and we had time to regularly see multiple friends and have parties and go to them, two of the great hosts were Emer and David Singleton. David had a great line in Beatles and Bob Dylan songs; he knew every damn one of them by heart and assumed I [...]