Sebastian Barry: Costa award denotes ‘re-arrival of a miraculous time’

Irish writer Sebastian Barry has described winning the Costa Novel Award for the second time as "the re-arrival of a miraculous time".

The Dublin-born author's novel Days Without End will now compete for the 2016 Costa Book of the Year. His previous novel The Secret Scripture won the Costa Book of the Year award in 2008 and was short listed for the Man Booker prize.

The award, previously known as the Whitbread, is the only major book prize open solely to authors resident in Ireland and Britain.

"For a writer, this sort of event is on the edge of a miracle, the odds are so against you. There are hundreds of books published every year, you can't treat it as a mere repetition, I see it as the re-arrival of a miraculous time, it was just a lovely thing to have happen to me," he told RTÉ's Morning Ireland.

He said: “I read for this book for a year, because it was going to have a lot of American history of the 1850s, 1860s, the American Civil War and Indian wars. But I also read a deal about our own famine history, and it struck me that since this man was going to get away. . . that we very rightly prioritise all the people who didn’t survive that journey, all the people who, when they arrived in America, were put into holding camps to die.

"It struck me that there were these thousands upon thousands of Irish people who did get through, who did get up to Canada or down into America and I thought, as a young person like Thomas McNulty in the book, whose country has been rescinded behind him, whose whole future has been removed from him — this could be a very angry sort of person coming out onto the American landscape and that's what he is.

“Like many people coming from Ireland at that time, he’s engaged straight away in that civil war. So there’s a sort of level of violence in the book.”

‘The importance of history’

When asked how fascinated he is with history, the author said: “I’m still a child who can’t settle dates in his mind and it seems to me, as Einstein suggested, all things are happening all the time.

“I can’t go back 150 years and believe it is a far distant thing, that it isn’t actually just to the left or right of our own time.

“I think that’s the importance of history. That’s the glory of history in fact, that it can help us, solace us, gird our loins for the present time.”

Mr Barry said that historians are grown up people, while writers are still allowed to go “in an experienced child-like way and claim the past as a sort or present and that’s an extremely exciting thing to do”.

He said: “If you happen to just hit a load of stuff that interests you greatly as a writer, that thrills you, then you’re in a sort of clover as a writer.

“I wouldn’t be capable of managing our complicated present — there’s something about the Irish past that we’ve never allowed be past, as a people we all believe in the past, as a present matter, that’s a characteristic for us and for very good reasons.

“History has been always the coals under our backside burning us.”