Q. You credit your mentor Pat Donlon at University College Dublin for directing you toward writing for a younger audience. Could you elaborate on her influence on your decision to concentrate on children’s literature?
A. I have always been writing and was publishing in magazines and newspapers, when I discovered during a creative writing course how much I enjoyed writing for children.
I was writing, drawing and painting picture book stories for my own children and decided to enrol in a course in children’s literature in UCD with Dr Pat Donlon. I mentioned to her about the picture books I was making. She asked to see them and before I knew it she had helped to set up a meeting for me with a new picture book imprint.
At the same time I was writing Under the Hawthorn Tree for my eldest daughter with no intention of ever publishing it. However, Pat was the one who encouraged me and told me that I must send it to publisher.
By the time Under the Hawthorn Tree came to be published Pat had been appointed Director of Ireland’s National Library. She kindly offered to launch the book in the library, which was an incredible privilege for a first-time author.
She has always been supportive of my work and I value her opinions. Thirty years on she launched my new book The Hungry Road.
Q. Looking back at the development of your career, are there specific writers who have been formative influences on your work?
A. As a kid I was a voracious reader and bookworm. I read widely, everything from Heidi to The Secret Garden, Hans Brinker and the Sliver Skates to Enid Blyton’s adventure books. I couldn’t get enough of words and stories and even wrote to a number of children’s authors in the hope of finding out the secret of becoming a writer!
During the long summers I would often sit on the wall overlooking the sea in Greystones and our neighbor, the wildlife journalist and author J Ashton Freeman, would chat to me about the seabirds and fish and wild animals that lived along the shore and the cliffs. Sometimes he would show me his sketchbook. I remember thinking how his work was so different than all the other adults who drove or took the train into the city and I could see how much he enjoyed it.
Then, when I was about 13 I remember going into our school hall for one of our monthly talks. Usually it was a priest or a nun back from the missions, or somebody that worked for a charity, but this day was very different as the headmistress s introduced us to a young poet called Seamus Heaney.
I can still remember being utterly riveted as he told us about his childhood and home place and began to read some of his early poems for us. I felt utterly transformed listening and watching him as he looked so nice and ordinary in his tweed jacket, with big hands and a hearty laugh, a complete contrast to the austere portraits of Yeats and Beckett and Joyce in our school books. I think that somehow I realised that writers could be ordinary people who did extraordinary things with words, and that it was possible even for a girl like me to write!
Many years later I got to know Heaney and told him of the impact of his visit to my school had on me. He confided it was one of his first times to read his poems in front of a large audience and that he had been really nervous being confronted by so many teenage girls. He had only agreed to come to talk to us as a favour for a relative of his who was involved with the school.
Q. Are there particular classics of children’s literature that have been especially important to you?
A. The first proper book I ever owned was a hardback illustrated collection of Hans Christian Anderson stories. It was such a beautiful book and Anderson created such pictures in my mind. However my all-time favourite writer was Laura Ingalls Wilder, I read and re-read all the Little House books over and over again. I also loved Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street.
I was fascinated by legends, not just Irish ones but Greek and Roman and Japanese, Chinese and Nordic. There was a fabulous illustrated series in my local library and I must have read and reread every one of them.
Q. Your trilogy of Famine novels for children, Under the Hawthorn Tree (1990), Wildflower Girl (1991), and Fields of Home (1996), have been enormously successful and translated into many languages. What was the inspiration for the first of these books and why was it so important that the publisher retain your original title?
A. I was inspired to write Under the Hawthorn Tree after hearing about the discovery of three small skeletons found buried under a big hawthorn tree in a school field. They were cutting down the tree to make a football pitch. Bone analysis showed that the skeletons were of three children from the time of the Great Famine. I couldn’t put those children from my mind and immediately began to write the book. I wrote it very quickly in only 12 weeks.
I was elated when my publisher agreed to publish the book, but upset when he told me that they were changing the name as they felt that Under the Hawthorn Tree was too obscure a book title.
I explained that I would never have written the book except for hearing about those three forgotten children. However, fate intervened as my US publisher Holiday House decided they wanted to use the title Under the Hawthorn Tree even if it was called something else here in Ireland. Fortunately, my publishers had a rethink and decided to keep the name.
It has been such a lucky book and no matter where I go in the world I find myself telling readers young and old about the story of those three small children of long ago found buried under a hawthorn tree.
Q. When you set out to write Under the Hawthorn Tree did you envision that the story would become a trilogy or is that something that evolved during the writing process?
A. Under the Hawthorn Tree was written for my daughter so there definitely was never any intention of any kind of follow-up. However, my publisher asked me about writing another book and out of the blue I found myself saying that I wanted to write a story about a little skivvy… an Irish maid working in a big house in America.
I had just read all about the growth of the banks in America and the huge contributions made by Irish emigrants whose nickels, dimes and dollars and savings helped to build up huge bank reserves and how determined most emigrants were to work for a better future.
It was only after I began to work on the book that I realised that maybe I should link them as I wanted to focus on leaving family and home place behind but also the adventure and hope of going to new land.
I did not need to create new characters as I already had Eily, Michael and Peggy, and so Peggy became the heroine of Wildflower Girl. The third book, Fields of Home, was written a few years later and follows on Eily and Michael and Peggy’s story as the struggle for land develops.
Q. One of your strengths is the ability to write relatable historical fiction for children while avoiding the pitfall of patronising your audience. When you began your career in children’s literature did you find it a challenge not only to write specifically for children, but also to write from the perspective of a child?
A. No, I find it easy to write for children and to have a vision of the path and journey I needed to make in order to tell the story. I have no problem seeing through the eyes of a child and in many ways suspect that I have somehow retained that clarity all through my life as I am blessed with optimism and hope.
Q. I understand that Under the Hawthorn Tree is now part of the national school curriculum. What sort of response or feedback have you received from teachers, parents and schoolchildren?
A. It is really satisfying to have so many children read the books and care so deeply about Eily, Michael and Peggy and their desperate fight to survive during The Great Hunger.
It is often the first big book that children read and I get so many letters from them telling me how much they love the book and the parts that move or excite them.
The teachers and schools are incredible as they do so much with the story and use it to expand English, history and art lessons. I visit so many schools as part of the Writers in Schools Scheme and an I am constantly amazed by the artwork and projects, letters and poems and models of cottages, workhouse and emigrant cases, and famine ships on display and the plays they put on, the dress up days, the puppets and animated cartoons and even computer games they have created around the book.
However, it is when they get home and they go out to play and they play the “Famine Game” with their friends in the back garden or out in the road, searching for food, building dens and fighting off the dogs that I realise just how much children have made the book their own.
Q. Has this trilogy been adapted for the stage or the screen? If so, were you involved in the creative process and were you satisfied with the results?
A number of film and TV companies have discussed options and developing the book, at various stages. In 1998 it was adapted by Young Filmmakers Ireland for a low-budget feature film as a part of a scheme to develop young Irish film talent.
It was made mostly made by young film production crew under the supervision of Mike Kelly and shot in Kilkenny. I was made welcome on set and it was shown on RTÉ, Channel 4 and in the US as they had all helped to fund the project. However, I do hope that eventually there will be a much larger-scale film production of Under the Hawthorn Tree.
It was first adapted for the stage in Canada in 2009 by Irish musician Mary Murphy Demers and director/ writer Mary Clarke and was staged in a small theatre in Vancouver. I went to Vancouver just before the show opened and we tweaked it slightly. The show had a large mixed cast of some professional but mostly amateur actors which worked brilliantly for the large crowd scenes and it enjoyed a sold-out run.
In 2018 I was approached by the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh and Northern Ireland’s Cahoots Theatre Company, which is based in Belfast, about dramatising the book to stage in the park. Every year the Folk Park was already hosting “Hawthorn Days” for families and schools to visit, which wove the story from the books through their exhibits.
I met with theatre director Paul McEneaney and playwright Charles Way who had already adapted a number of classic children’s stories for the stage. They very successfully staged a version for the park with incredible music by Gareth McConaghie. Seeing how well that it worked they went on to develop it for a bigger theatre audience.
I was kept involved at all stages and was able to meet Charles and Paul and the cast in the rehearsal rooms in the Mac Theatre in Belfast which I found a very rewarding experience. I always felt my input was important to them as we all wanted to get it just right. The show enjoyed a totally sold-out run in September 2018 and returned to the Mac Theatre again at the end of January 2020, before transferring to theatres across Ireland attracting huge audiences and closing its hugely successful run just before the Covid-19 lockdown began here. It is hoped that Cahoots will stage it again both here and overseas.
Q. Another difficult subject you have tackled for young readers is the issue of the Travelling community and the discrimination they face from society at large. Your book, The Blue Horse (1992), won the Bisto Book of the Year in 1993 and has been widely read in classrooms throughout Ireland. What was the inspiration for this novel and what kind of research did you do during your writing process?
A. The Blue Horse started off as a short story for my publishers at Penguin about Katie, a young Traveller, who gets caught up in a fire in her caravan. I had had just sent it off to my editor in London when I spotted a young Traveller sitting on a big rock outside a school where I was talking. She was the exact image of the girl in my story. I knew there and then I wanted to write a book about kids like her.
I had to ask for my story back and wrote another story quickly for them and then set about writing The Blue Horse. I wasn’t even sure that I would find anyone wanting to publish such a book about prejudice and injustice.
I was fortunate to be awarded an Irish Arts Council bursary which gave me the time to research the book and meet and talk to Travellers and those who worked with them. A Traveller friend was a great help and arranged for me to talk with a few of her friends. I visited two Traveller schools and got to know some great kids who were very candid and honest with me. I am immensely proud of the book and it means a lot to me that so many young readers get engrossed in Katie’s story which hopefully helps everyone have a better understanding of the lives of families just like Katie’s.
Q. Your first adult novel was the 1999 bestseller, The Magdalen. It tells the story of a young pregnant girl from Connemara who is banished to Dublin by her family to work in one the infamous Magdalene Laundries operated by various religious institutions, primarily Catholic orders of nuns. What drew you to write about this terrible period in Ireland’s history? Can you talk about the historical research you engaged in for this book and whether you had an opportunity to interview any of the Magdalene Laundry survivors?
A. I was always curious about the Magdalene laundries and homes as there was one in Donnybrook beside the church we attended, and in which I was baptised. As I am adopted, growing up I wondered if somehow I might have been born there. I was drawn to the story of the Magdalene women and the babies they were forced to give up.
I eventually found out that I wasn’t in fact born there but I still was intrigued by their story. There was huge outcry here in Ireland when Magdalene women were found buried in unmarked graves when a former Magdalene home in Drumcondra was sold for development. It stirred up a huge amount of controversy and national soul searching about the treatment and neglect of so many forgotten women. I began to write the book, my first big adult novel. I attended one or two events around the time and got to know people who had been in children’s homes and were involved in helping survivors of such institutions. Also it was easy enough to read accounts and talk to people who had worked in or visited the homes.
Q. Rebel Sisters (2016) is a novel about the real-life Gifford sisters, Muriel, Grace and Nellie, whose wealthy, privileged lives were changed forever when they became involved with the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. Muriel falls in love with writer Thomas MacDonagh, artist Grace meets Joseph Plunkett, and Nellie joins the Citi-zen Army and takes up arms to fight alongside Countess Markievicz in the rebellion. In recent years there has been a concerted effort by historians and artists to write women back into the history of the 1916 rebellion. Was this the impulse behind this novel?
A. It is strange but 1916 is once again a subject that I never intended writing about as so much had been written in various ways about the leaders of the Rising. But then visiting Kilmainham Jail with my daughter and seeing the chapel where Grace Gifford and Joe Plunkett married just before he was executed touched me deeply. I was curious about Grace and was very surprised to discover that her sister Muriel was married to his friend and fellow 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh. I had never seen any mention of this before… perhaps because they were just women. However, the real eureka moment was discovering that their sister Nellie had also fought in the Rising and was actually imprisoned in Kilmainham Jail at the time that her two brothers-in-law were executed.
It was an incredible journey to discover the amazing connections and involvement the Gifford sisters had, not only with the 1916 Rising and its leaders, the Great War, but also with the 1913 lockout, the suffragette movement, theatre and the arts and the huge circle of brave and intelligent women that they constantly moved in.
Rebel Sisters involved a massive amount of research over three years but it gave me a totally new perspective on one of the most important times in Ireland’s history. I was very fortunate that just as it was coming near publication this growing movement to acknowledge women’s place in history and the arts was beginning to happen. I remember reading a chapter from the book at an arts festival months before it came out and getting a huge response to it and the fact that I had chosen to write about the women of that time, putting them and their concerns at the very heart of the 1916 Rising
Q. Your most recent novel, The Hungry Road (2020), is a Famine story for adults. Through various shifts in perspective and voices, the novel reveals the complex historical predicament of the unfolding tragedy. It also details the subtle class nuances which contribute in part to the characters destinies. Did you feel you had more to say on this subject and that you could explore the Great Hunger in more historical detail if you aimed the story at an adult audience?
A. The Great Irish Famine has been a huge part of my life over the past 30 years. I myself have learned so much over the intervening years since I first wrote Under the Hawthorn Tree and found myself yet again drawn to it. But this time to a quite different story, an adult novel set both in the present and the past with the famine as key element.
I began to research it again and especially the town of Skibbereen, where my mother was from. I discovered the heroic role that Dr Dan Donovan, the workhouse doctor, had played during those terrible times and how the good people of the town came together to open a soup kitchen to try to save the lives of the starving and the sick. Once I began to read Doctor Dan’s words I knew that I had to focus on him and this town and its people, which was the very epicentre of Ireland’s Great Hunger.
I also soon realized that the facts and figures and the huge numbers involved were far worse than even I had ever imagined. It was another massive undertaking in terms of research and time with a very different perspective but it was great to be able to expand on that complexity and the calamity and tragedy of the famine and the massive impact it wrought on us as a people.
Q. The book’s chief protagonist is the seamstress Mary Sullivan, and one of the details of her life is how she supports her family by sewing burial shrouds for the Famine victims. It is this kind of detail that really brings the book to life. Was this a common practice?
A. Yes, there are many accounts of people sewing shrouds as they wanted their loved ones to be covered before they were buried or thrown in the mass burial pits. Coffins had become a luxury and often could not be obtained in time as bodies had to be buried quickly so many had to purchase or make shrouds.
Mary is such a strong woman, and I did not want her to be seen as a victim. I wanted to demonstrate her intelligence, resourcefulness and her determination to fight for her children. Pre-Famine Skibbereen was a prosperous town with a good number of dressmakers. I had a picture of Mary with a needle in her hand sewing, and immediately knew that this small item would make an enormous difference to the survival of the Sullivan family.
Q. Dr Dan Donovan is a key character in The Hungry Road. Is he based on the actual Dr Donovan who helped establish soup kitchens and who wrote Diary of a Dispensary Doctor for the Cork newspapers?
A. Yes. Dan Donovan was a first-hand witness to what happened to the people and the town of Skibbereen during The Great Hunger. His factual account and recording of events in the workhouse and the dispensary and doing autopsies on bodies revealed a scale of hunger and disease that is almost unimaginable. He was a good, compassionate man who always put the lives of his patients foremost.
Q. Were the resources of the National Famine Museum at Stokestown Park helpful to your research on the Famine inspired novels?
A. The new book is set in west Cork not in Roscommon so much of my research was focused on events in that area. However, the National Famine Museum in Strokestown is a huge resource for anyone interested in the famine and researching it.
I was asked by the National Famine Museum, as part of the development of Ireland’s National Famine Way, to write a story about the 1,490 tenants that at the height of the Great Hunger were evicted from Strokestown Estate in May 1847. They were made walk 165km, all the way to Dublin along by the banks of the Royal Canal to take passage on ships to Liverpool and Canada. Unfortunately many fell ill on the long sea voyage and died while others lost their lives while quarantined on Grosse Isle.
Young Daniel Thighe set off on that long arduous journey with his mother, brothers, sisters and uncle. He and his sister were among the few fortunate orphans that survived, and were adopted by a Canadian family. The story is available on The National Famine Way app for those undertaking the walk or cycle.
Q. Given the current pandemic spreading throughout the world today, would you consider writing a novel about Ireland during the coronavirus? As you have been able to successfully broach difficult subject matter with a young audience through literature, might this not be an appropriate topic?
A. Not a novel! But I have just finished a short story, A Good Woman, which is set during the Covid pandemic.
Q. Your fiction typically features a female protagonist. Is this a conscious decision on your part to tell the story from a woman or young girl’s perspective, or does the material dictate that aesthetic decision?
A. Women and girls’ perspectives have so often been often been ignored in literature. With Under the Hawthorn Tree I was very conscious that I was writing it for my daughter and her sisters and brother and that in terms of Irish children’s literature, girls as main heroes rarely featured. When you are writing, one of the most important decisions is through whose eyes are you going to tell your story. So often the female eye can bring a total freshness and emotion to a story which enhances it.
Q. In her book Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Laurie argues that gifted writers often use children’s literature to transfigure sorrow, nostalgia, and the struggles of their own experience. Could you comment on her thesis?
A. I think Alison Lurie makes a very valid point as my own childhood and experiences have no doubt played their part in my writing and how I write and what I write about. Our childhood influences everything we are and what we become or strive to become.
Q. What advice would you give to beginning writers who are interested in writing for children or a young adult audience?
A. Read as much as you can. So often people come up to me and tell me they want to write a children’s book, but when I ask them who are their favorite children’s writers or which children’s books do they love, they just shrug and admit that they never bother reading them. They just assume that writing for kids or YA will be easier and shorter than writing an adult novel and might even be more lucrative. Go read lots of good children’s books; new ones and old ones, picture books and novels. Fill your heart with them so that you realise what a privilege it is to write for children and to have them not only read your book but care about it.
Q. Similarly, what advice would you give to beginning writers interested in writing historical fiction?
A. History is all around us but you must be curious, and a bit like a detective looking for clues that will lead you into a story. Old houses, old places, old books, letters photos, paintings, maps and music all have a huge part to play if you are trying to build a story set in the past. But what you really need is a tall ladder of imagination to climb to that extra distance that facts and information have led you to. I inhabit the past when I am writing and the hope is that my reader will also get lost in it. Also try to write about someone or something that has been overlooked in history or write from a very different perspective than previous books.
Q. What are you working on at the moment?
A. I am half way through a new children’s book. There is hardly any research needed which is great. Then I plan to start a new adult book. I just love writing and tend to just go from one book to another.
