The Irish Times Books Podcast

April’s Irish Times Books Podcast features interviews with Sinéad Gleeson about her acclaimed collection of personal essays, Constellations, and Sarah Davis-Goff, co-founder of Tramp Press, about her own first novel, Last Ones Left Alive, a dystopian novel set in the west of Ireland in the near future.

Martin Doyle talks to young author Kevin Breathnach about his acclaimed debut collection of essays, Tunnel Vision, which mixes art history with remarkably candid accounts of his own life.

Plus: In the five decades since their inception, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Awards have helped to launch the careers of many of Ireland’s best known authors, including Sebastian Barry, Joe O’Connor, Colum McCann and Mike McCormack. Ciaran Carty, curator of the awards, on that prestigious history.

The Books Podcast is sponsored by Green & Blacks.

Laura Slattery talks to Lisa Harding, author of Harvesting.

Books Editor Martin Doyle talks to Helen Cullen about her novel The Lost Letters of William Woolf.

Recorded at the Waterford Writers Festival.

Grace, the third novel by Irish author Paul Lynch, was the winner of this year’s Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. In this month’s Irish Times Book Club podcast, recorded at the Irish Writers Centre in Parnell Square in Dublin, Lynch tells us how he came to write the story of a young girl as she crosses the famine-stricken Ireland of the 1840s.

Lynch, who is also the author of Red Sky in Morning and The Black Snow, talks about how he researched the darkest consequences of famine, the influence of Cormac McCarthy on his work and how he built the hallucinatory quality of Grace’s desperate journey into his writing style, which has been praised for being lush and lyrical without prettifying the scars of the era.

The writer, who grew up in Co Donegal, also discusses what he has carried forward from his years as a film critic for the Sunday Tribune to the process of writing a novel, why he doesn’t identify easily with the label “historical fiction” and what he is working on next.

The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal is May’s Irish Times Book Club choice. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction even before it was published in late March, it is a tragic Birmingham Irish love story set against the backdrop of the IRA bombings that devastated the city in 1974.

Kit spoke to Martin Doyle at the International Literature Festival Dublin last week.

This month's guest is Sinéad Gleeson, one of Ireland's leading arts journalists.

She is a former presenter of the book show on RTE radio and the editor of three anthologies of Irish short stories.

Next year Picador will publish a collection of Sinéad's own essays, provisionally titled 'Constellations'.

She talked to Martin Doyle at the Irish Writers Centre to discuss The Long Gaze Back, an anthology of Irish Women Writers which Sinead edited. The Long Gaze Back is April's Irish Times Book Club choice.

This episode features a conversation between Irish Times Books Editor Martin Doyle and June Caldwell, author of Room Little Darker, at the Mountains to Sea festival in Dun Laoghaire last month.

As ever, the podcast recording was preceded by a series of articles about Room Little Darker on irishtimes.com, written by fellow authors and critics including Maighread Medbh, Alan McMonagle, Joanna Walsh, Michael Harding, Justine-Delaney Wilson, Elske Rahill and Frankie Gaffney.

And those interested can still find those pieces on irishtimes.com.

Originally this event was due to take place at the Ennis Book Club festival, but that event was postponed due to the terrible weather. So thanks to Mountains to Sea for facilitating the event at short notice.

Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney’s critically acclaimed first novel, has picked up deserved word-of-mouth momentum since it was published earlier this year. In this month’s Irish Times Book Club podcast, recorded live at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin, Rooney explains how it came into being.

For those who have yet to succumb to the pleasure of this talented young author’s debut, Conversations With Friends tells the lucid, painful, addictive, story of 21-year-old Frances, a Dublin student who embarks on a torturous affair with 32-year-old actor Nick, who is married to writer/photographer Melissa, who Frances’s closest friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi has a bit of a crush on.

Published by Faber after a seven-way bidding auction, Conversations with Friends was praised in The Irish Times for its fearless writing, while it was described in the New Yorker as “a new kind of adultery novel”.

The novel - which tracks Frances’s relationship with Bobbi, Nick, Melissa, her parents, her body and her place in the world - unfolds in a wealth of smart exchanges, as Frances plays conversational table tennis and uses analytical language to deflect her emotions and hide the fact that she’s not anywhere near as relentlessly self-composed as she likes to make out.

In this podcast, Rooney explores how she developed the distinctive tone of Conversations With Friends through dialogue, why people sometimes think she is Frances and Frances is her, and how she writes in concentrated, intense periods. She also gives us some hints about her recently submitted and much-anticipated second novel.

Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty is October’s Irish Times Book Club pick. The Edgar Award-winning thriller is the fifth in the Carrickfergus-born author’s Sean Duffy series about a Catholic RUC man set in Troubles-era Northern Ireland.

McKinty spoke with Irish Times Books Editor Martin Doyle in Belfast’s Europa Hotel on Saturday, October 28th as part of the inaugural NOIRELAND International Crime Fiction Festival.