Lucy Caldwell has always had a love of short stories, but the novelist and playwright waited until 2016 to publish her first collection, Multitudes. In this podcast, Caldwell explains why short stories are so difficult to craft, but why writing them can be “utterly addictive”.
She tells us why the 11 stories in Multitudes are more autobiographical in subject matter than her earlier work, why she put lonely female adolescences at the heart of the collection, and why writing about the premature birth of a baby boy felt like “writing for survival”.
2016 has proven a busy year for Caldwell. Rehearsals are under way for her next project, the “thrilling, but utterly terrifying” process of reimagining Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters as a tale of emigration set in contemporary Belfast.
The Belfast-born writer discusses why she waited until this point in her career to write about her home city, and why she wanted to write about abortion in Northern Ireland in her contribution to Sinéad Gleeson’s new short story anthology The Glass Shore.
Multitudes by Lucy Caldwell is published by Faber
