“There were very often riots and petrol bombs being hurled.”Īt one point, Cushla is the only Catholic at a children’s party. She remembers rubber bullets being fired as she ducked to the floor of the car on her way to see her grandmother, who lived near Ardoyne, in north Belfast. Its two main characters – Cushla, a twenty-something Catholic teacher and sometime barmaid in her brother’s pub, and Michael, a married, Protestant barrister – were made up, but Kennedy based much of the backdrop on her childhood. Trespasses was also inspired by her upbringing as a Catholic in Holywood, a small, mainly Protestant town, on the shores of Belfast Lough. “My hot place for writing – a term the poet Martina Evans uses for a time or a location or some sort of event in a writer’s life where all of the work springs from – is the time I spent in the north in the 70s,” she says. Yet it has, helped by getting shortlisted, twice, for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and a nine-way auction for The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, which is steeped in Irish history. So I didn’t think that would ever happen.”
“It wasn’t that I thought: ‘Ooh, I’ve found a new career and I can stop being a chef.’ It’s really hard to write and get paid for it. Not that she expected writing to lead to a pot of gold. In January 2014, I felt I’d thrown everything I had at it and nothing was ever going to work. It was incredibly shit, trying to run a business that you know is failing. Hosted by Caroline Magennis, Reader in 20th & 21st Century Literature at University of Salford.Her fervour for anything other than the struggling restaurant she ran with her husband was also a factor. Louise has been twice shortlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and is the author of the acclaimed collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac. Her stories have won the Harpers Bazaar short story competition and been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Jan’s second novel, The Fire Starters, won the EU Prize for Literature.
Set in and around Belfast against a backdrop of the Troubles, lives are changed forever. Louise Kennedy’s beautifully vivid Trespasses tells of an affair between Catholic primary teacher Cushla and Michael, a Protestant lawyer nearly twice her age. As each of the dead children visit her, Hannah begins to question her religious upbringing as the adults fall apart. Hannah’s classmates are dying of a mystery plague to which she’s immune. Jan Carson’s The Raptures is a playful, inventive whodunnit set in the small town of Ballylack. Two award-winning stars of Irish writing join us to discuss their acclaimed novels.
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