Award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan talks to us about his latest book, 'Heart, Be at Peace', a companion novel to his debut 'The Spinning Heart', and how working as a university lecturer in creative writing has made a difference to his own writing style.
Image Credit: Manon Gilbart
Donal Ryan is an award-winning Irish author, whose work has been published in over twenty languages to major critical acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was voted 'Irish Book of the Decade'. His fourth novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018, and won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature.
His novel, Strange Flowers, was voted Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was a number one bestseller, as was his 2022 novel The Queen of Dirt Island, which was also shortlisted for Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Donal's latest book, Heart, Be at Peace was published by Doubleday in August 2024 and is also available from the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
My parents were ordinary rural working people, and in the eighties, like everyone else, had little or no disposable income. They did have a talent for sourcing books in cheap job lots, though, from house auctions for example, and our small house was always filled with books. My mother taught me to read before I started school. Years later, having moved to a bigger house, my parents built on a small library for their collection. Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World was my big childhood book. It gripped me so tight I could hardly breathe, and the ending still makes me happy.
It’s actually not quite true, because the number of rejections was far higher. I just happened to have 47 rejections on a file on my laptop on the day I was asked about rejections by Hilary Adam White, a journalist with the Irish Independent. If I added in the hard copy rejections (mostly single sentences on compliment slips paper-clipped to my returned manuscripts in their SAEs) and non-replies, it would have been up around a hundred. I expected that level of rejection, though. I was trying to sell two novels in 2010/2011 when the world’s wealth seemed to have been absorbed by bondholders indemnities.
My first novel, The Thing About December, which became my second published novel, was picked up by Sarah Davis-Goff, who was then an intern at The Lilliput Press. She asked her colleague Daniel Caffrey to read it. He also loved it, and they recommended it to Lilliput’s owner, Antony Farrell, who agreed with them, luckily for me. When they invited me to their office in Dublin for a chat I brought my draft of The Spinning Heart with me, and Antony offered me a two book deal. I remember sitting in my old Saab on Sitric Avenue, Stoneybatter, and crying on the phone to my wife Anne Marie. I could not believe what had just happened.
I get up early, even though I HATE GETTING UP EARLY. I drink coffee. I complain to my dog about getting up early. She pretends to agree but she loves early rises. But then she sleeps all day. I slouch sulkily towards my office in the attic. I plug headphones into my amp and play AC/DC and Led Zeppelin riffs for around an hour. I rearrange my books. I go back downstairs and drink more coffee. I don’t eat until midday so my blood sugar starts to dip and drags my mood down with it. I lose the will to exist. I go back upstairs. I read the previous day’s work. A new sentence forms itself. My mood improves. A paragraph forms. I know it’s going to be okay.
I was in a bit of a panic because I’d just spent two years writing a long, transgressive, ruminative novel that no one liked except me. I didn’t have time to make any more mistakes. My grandmother sent me an idea from wherever she is in the universe, and I knew it was a good one. A house full of women. Three generations, then four. But I had to take a careful, methodical, modular approach to the novel’s construction. I couldn’t afford to wander off on any mad tangents. The new term at the University of Limerick where I teach creative writing was looming, and I had to have a good, workable draft finished before my days were filled again with other people’s words. The idea of short, episodic chapters describing these women’s lives together, lensed through a single character’s eyes, seemed workable. I was inspired a bit by Evan S Connell’s novels Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge. I also had a more romantic idea about each day of our lives being the exact same length, give or take a millisecond here or there, and in any day, anything can happen. One revolution of the earth can see you lose a parent, become a parent, meet the love of your life, meet your death. Another revolution can see you go to work, come home, watch Coronation Street, go to bed. Those revolutions are exactly equal. Some days are huge and momentous, some are ordinary, some are beautiful and unforgettable, some days change every day that follows, but every day is the exact same length.
It’s a companion novel to my debut, The Spinning Heart. It has the same polyphonic structure, and the same characters speak in the same sequence. The action is set a decade later. The characters inhabit an unnamed village in rural Tipperary and the nearby town of Nenagh. The main character (if a polyphonic novel can be said to have one), Bobby Mahon, is a local builder who has set himself the task of doing battle with a local drugs gang.
It definitely has changed the way I write. Before I started to work with other writers, most of whom are trying to find their note and their groove, I was a bit blasé about craft, trusting my instincts to guide me, and relying on my literary loves and heroes for creative sustenance. Teaching has forced me to objectively deconstruct my own habits and processes, and to engage in a much more concerted and thoughtful way with the business of craft. It’s made me more rounded and thoughtful as a writer, and more willing to experiment. I don’t think I’d have written All We Shall Know, a novel narrated by a teacher pregnant with her student’s child, if I hadn’t spent the previous two years exhorting my classes to take risks, to push at their own boundaries.
I’ve finished my next novel. Or a draft of it, anyway. Hopefully it’ll be my next published novel, anyway. I’m really happy with it, and Anne Marie really likes it, so those important hurdles are cleared, at least. I have no professional ambition. This can be a problem at times, but mostly it makes life easier. I’m only ambitious for my sentences. And I love the idea of my books being read. One happy reader is worth a fortune.
Plainsong, by Kent Haruf. Beautiful, perfect. And any of Mary O’Malley’s poetry collections. Her latest is The Shark Factory. She will win the Nobel.
Always brake before a bend, never in a bend.
I once found a golden ticket in a Wonka Bar and won a visit to a chocolate factory.
