Tell me about your latest novel, The Bookseller’s Gift. It was inspired by your author visits to bookshops and libraries across rural Ireland?
Yes. It’s about a mother and daughter who pool their resources to open a bookshop in a fictional west coast town, and explores themes I often revisit: community; small-town enterprise; cross-generational family relationships; second chances; love in middle-age; ecological survival.
You describe it as ‘uplit’. How do you define that?
Uplit’s essence is an optimism that doesn’t shy away from darker themes like death, grief, social isolation and past trauma.
You taught briefly at Mount Anville but the nun who offered you a job advised you to go to London and be a creative artist
I’d studied English, Irish and history in UCD, and taught Irish for a year. My parents thought of teaching as the perennial Irish “something to fall back on”. Apparently, it was always evident that my heart was elsewhere.
You trained as an actor. Does that feed into your writing? What were your career highlights?
My first professional job was a BBC Radio 4 Emlyn Williams premiere, about Tolstoy’s death at Astopovo station. Michael Redgrave played Tolstoy, and I was cast as the station master’s daughter who was with him when he died. Effectively, it was a two-hander, topped and tailed by Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, as the girl in old age. Gwen had a different recording day, but left me her script with a charming inscription. Afterwards Val Gielgud, then head of BBC radio drama, wrote me a letter saying I had a great career ahead of me. In moves from damp bedsit to bedsit, I lost both the script and the letter.
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My acting career probably does feed my writing. I certainly see my novels as working like Shakespearean pastoral comedies: they juxtapose psychological realism with the kind of comedy readers recognise from contemporary romcom film, US TV sitcom or classic English panto.
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You were briefly big in Japan with your work in early CD-rom
My husband, Wilf, and I worked together on CD-rom content-creation for a company called Notting Hill, set up by Andreas Whittam Smith of the UK Independent newspaper. Wilf produced and I wrote scripts, which included interactive user-driven video and audio “interviews” with figures from history by contemporary experts, including Jonathan Miller. The hit in Japan was brief, but we did win awards, and the work was ground-breaking.
You and your husband, opera director Wilf Judd, divide your time between the west Kerry Gaeltacht and London. Is that the best of both worlds? It inspired your first book, the memoir The House on an Irish Hillside (2012)
Those two bases, and the balance between them, took 30 years to achieve. But, yes, definitely the best of both worlds.
Another memoir, A Woven Silence: Memory, History & Remembrance (2015), mapped the lives of the women in your family on to the creation of the Irish State
So many of Ireland’s revolutionary women felt disillusioned and betrayed after the State was set up. That book arose from the experience of my Enniscorthy grandmother’s cousin, Marion Stokes, one of the Cumann na mBan girls who raised the Tricolour over Enniscorthy’s Athenaeum in Easter Week. I’d known Marion in her old age, and had no idea she’d been out in 1916, and a lifelong revolutionary, till I read a piece by Colm Tóibín in the New York Review of Books. He’d referenced the fact that he hadn’t known about her past either, though when he was growing up in Enniscorthy, she’d been a family friend.
Your debut novel, The Library at the Edge of The World (2016), began the Finfarran series, about a local librarian in contemporary rural Ireland. Why do you think it caught readers’ imaginations?
Readers seem to love books about books, and uplit’s a growing genre – though, you could say it’s been around since Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë.
Which projects are you working on?
A standalone for Hachette Ireland, for publication next year.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Read the kind of books you wouldn’t think of writing yourself.
Who do you admire the most?
Greta Thunberg.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I’d ban the electronic amplification of all street music.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
I’m a huge fan of Rónán Hession’s writing, currently don’t have time to see films, and love The Quiet Riot podcast, which covers contemporary politics.
Which public event affected you most?
The celebrations when Ireland repealed the Eighth Amendment.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
Has to be Corca Dhuibhne.
Your most treasured possession?
My mother’s wedding ring.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
Thomas Kinsella’s The Táin, for his translation and Louis Le Brocquy’s illustrations.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
The entire cast of Annie West’s graphic novel The Late Night Writers Club.
The best and worst things about where you live?
All’s good – I’ve achieved that perfect balance.
What is your favourite quotation?
Beckett (in rehearsal): “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Who is your favourite fictional character?
The mother in James Stephens’s The Charwoman’s Daughter.
A book to make me laugh?
Any of the Ross O’Carroll-Kellys.
A book that might move me to tears?
Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Journey Into The Whirlwind.
The Bookseller’s Gift by Felicity Hayes-McCoy is published by Hachette Ireland
