Interview with January Magazine

So she tells you that she’s a writer and you ask what she writes and she says “short stories” and you say: “Are you working on a novel?”

I was delighted to be interviewed by January Magazine for their July issue. We had a great chat about the merits and challenges of the short story form, and I tried to answer the question 'why write short stories instead of a novel?' Stories can be harder than novels; with a novel, you create a world and then sustain it for a few hundred pages, but with each new short story you have to build a new world from scratch. But stories can also be incredibly liberating... 

My Mental Knuckle-fight with Irishness

"Looking back, I see our house as an Irish space station which had drifted off orbit." 

I've been overwhelmed by the response to my article in the Irish Times this week. This morning I woke up to emails from New Zealand, Italy and the USA, from people sharing their experiences of growing up Irish abroad, or of growing up in Ireland with parents from elsewhere. I hope this will open up lots of meaningful conversations on Irish identity, and that we can really start to create a more inclusive definition of what it means to be Irish in 2016.