Show Notes
Why do so many readers tell writer Neil Hegarty that he captured their own family dynamic in his debut novel Inch Levels?
Perhaps the burial of past traumas was so common an enterprise in Ireland among a certain generation, it meant many of the next generation grew up absorbing the bleak effects of this silence – the theme of Hegarty’s book.
In this month’s Irish Times Book Club podcast, recorded live at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin, he tells us about the genesis of Inch Levels, a story of family secrecies, difficult dependencies and mutually enforced repressions.
The novel has been praised for vividly evoking the wild beauty of the Lough Swilly shoreline – Hegarty, who is from Derry, talks about the importance of using location and landscape to map the mental processes of his characters.
He also explains why a forgotten wartime tragedy was the starting point for this book, set between the 1930s and 1980s, tells us about the surprise Brexit interpretation that followed its publication in 2016 and explores the impact that writing fiction has had on his brain.
More from The Irish Times Books Podcast
A reading of 'The Little Red Balloon', the winning entry in the 15-18 category of the Children's Short Story competition, by 17-year-old Emma Broderick, of Muckross Park College, Dublin.
Books Editor Martin Doyle talks to Darran Anderson about his memoir of growing up in Troubles-torn Derry, Inventory: A River, A City, A Family.
Welcome to The Irish Times Books Podcast. In this latest episode, Martin Doyle talk to The Irish Times’s two regular crime fiction reviewers, Declan Burke and Declan Hughes, both acclaimed crime writers themselves, about their favourite crime fiction of 2019.
On the eve of this weekend’s Echoes festival in Dalkey, celebrating Maeve Binchy and Irish writing, its programmer, author Henrietta McKervey, and Maeve’s widower, Gordon Snell, join me to talk about the thinking behind the festival and the many ways in which Maeve’s memory is being kept alive.
It has been some year for Danielle McLaughlin. On Thursday, she won the 2019 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, whose £30,000 (€33,500) prize money makes it the world’s richest for a short story. Last March, she was awarded the $165,000 (€150,000) Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.