27th February 2026


Ana Kinsella Frida Slattery as Herself


addictive as well.” Also conveyed is the reality of a life devoted to making art. Beyond the time spent in rehearsal or on the stage, there is the waiting around: “There are so many moments along the way that are filled with introspec- tion and reflection and maybe desire for something to happen, that kind of waiting and yearning. That seemed quite a rich scene for fiction.”


U


nfolding through the plays they collaborate on, the debut novel from Irish author Ana


Kinsella tells of the relationship between Frida Slattery, an actor, and John Reddan, a theatre direc- tor, over 17 years. In 2005, the pair meet properly for the first time at Kehoe’s pub in Dublin. Frida, a recent graduate, is willing her acting career into being, very conscious that she is just one among many young women at every audition. Whereas John is five years older, already a writer and director of note. But Frida Slattery as Herself is not a love story. At least, not only a love story. Over video call from Dublin, Kinsella says: “I think there’s a lot of ambiguity around it: I didn’t want it to be a traditional love story. I wanted it to be about a lot more than that.” From their first meeting, both


Frida and John sense the potential in each other in terms of their respective careers. A year later, John is wrestling with an idea for a play about his childhood obser- vation of the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. He has, writes Kinsella, “passed the thing called Bird through many gauzy layers of allegory and expression” and many revisions. But when he casts Frida as the Woman in the two-hander, Bird the play takes flight. During rehearsals, John watches his actors: “It worked best when he let them take his script and bend it lightly over the tops of their knees, solder it, agitate it just enough to see what kind of sparks could fly out of it,” Kinsella writes. Over the next decade and a half, professional ambition and a desire to make meaningful work will pull them together, but other forces will drive them apart.


08 K


insella grew up in Dublin dreaming of a career in fashion magazines. She read English and


Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, then moved to London for an MA in Fashion Journalism at Central Saint Martins. But once established as a fashion journalist, both in-house for magazines and as a freelancer, she made a discovery: “I thought I cared more about the fashion part than the writing part, but then once I actually started to do it – and it was that moment where every- thing was moving from print to digital and things were changing so quickly – I found it was the writing that I really wanted to do more of.” In 2017, she started an email newsletter for a small but dedicated readership of fashion insiders, the fabulously titled The London Review of Looks, which eventually formed the basis of her 2022 non-fiction book, Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City (Daunt Books). When Kinsella moved back


Frida Slattery as Herself is clev-


erly structured. Kinsella tells me that, after she first had the idea for her central characters, she wrote down a list of projects that they might have made together. “Once I had this list, I was like, well, I’d have to write about that play, and I’d have to write about that film. And then suddenly that became the structure, it became this backbone.” The novel also examines the


precarity of the artistic life and the time spent on hiatus.


Early on, one of Frida’s actor- turned-writer friends decides on a corporate career instead. Not that that is a viable option for Frida or John. “I think it does feel, for both of them, like they are a hair away from something happening at all times, things can change so quickly. From my friends who have pursued careers in music or the arts or acting [I know] you are one audition away from a completely different kind of life for yourself, forever. I think that element of chance and risk is probably quite


home to Dublin after 12 years in London, this sparked Frida Slattery as Herself, “that desire to think about place and about how the decisions we make in our lives can take us very far away and the also bring us back”. She is part of a “really wonderful” book club in the city: “The thing we always like is that feeling as a group, even though our tastes are all different, [of] ‘This is a real world I can get lost in. I feel the emotional stakes in the lives of the charac- ters.’” With her own novel: “I just wanted to create that feeling for other readers.”


REPORTING Alice O’Keeffe


Scribner, 7th May, £16.99, HB, 9781398549227


Debuts of the Year Author Profile


SOPHIE DAVIDSON


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