up in the same town in the west of Ireland and started a clandestine relationship. When they meet again at Trinit, their tumultuous union reignites. Normal People is much the same milieu as Rooney’s début—privileged, student, boozy Dublin—and covers the ground of love and loss with freshness and intimacy. Rooney’s characters do love to talk—and talk. They discuss


everything: art, literature, sex, feminism, politics and, of course, each other. These intense conversations are wide-ranging, clever, funny, mind-expanding and thought-provoking. In their volubilit and willingness to discuss anything and everything, her charac- ters remind one of those found in the films of Woody Allen. While Rooney has reservations about the man himself, she says she is a fan of his oeuvre, and she also admires the work of indie filmmak- ers Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. “What I really like about Woody Allen’s films is that there’s a real investment in personal relationships. There is the idea that this is a serious concern worth making serious art about—how we love other people and how we can negotiate our relationships with them.”


R


ooney grew up in a “house full of books” in Mayo with very encouraging parents. She says: “I think they were always open to me announcing that I was going to be a writer. That felt like something I was allowed to say.” She wrote from a very young age and first had a couple of poems published in The Stinging Fly, an Irish literary magazine focused on new writers—which, in a virtuous circle, Rooney now edits. Conversations with Friends began life as a short story that “kept growing” until she realised it was actually a novel. Three months later she had 100,000 words under


her belt, a huge mental boost. “I was filled with ‘Oh my God, I’ve writen a novel—I can do anything!’” she says, laughing. Her path to publication is every aspiring writer’s fantasy. While still at Trinit she had fiction and essays published in respected literary journals Granta and the Dublin Review, which caught the eye of literary agent Tracy Bohan at the high-powered The Wylie Agency. When Conversations with Friends was finished, the novel was sent out and seven publishers were immediately vying for her services, with the venerable Faber signing her for a reported six-figure deal. Rooney continues to flit between


Sally Rooney became the joint-youngest recipi- ent—tied with none other than 2001 winner Zadie Smith—of the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017, when she won for her novel Conversations with Friends


poetry, shorter prose and novels. (She won the £30,000 2017 Sunday Times/ EFG Short Story Award for “Mr Salary”, in a “blind” prize in which the judges do not know the identities of the entries.) Rooney says: “I have no very sophisticated


understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are tpically shorter than either, though not always. As a writer I find novels the most satisfying, and also the hardest,


maybe because I let myself get away with things in short stories that I don’t (or can’t) get away with in a novel. I love all literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most oſten.” When awarding the Nibbie to Normal People, judges called it “almost perfect, a gem of a novel”. To reiterate, Rooney is two years shy of her 30th birthday—there is sure to be much more to come.


IRELAND’S RECENT AWARD SPREE


ANNA BURNS Belfast-born Burns may be the best-known writer on this list, though the literary author was far less renowned before she won last year’s Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman. She shares a publisher with Rooney in Faber & Faber, and was shortlisted for the Fiction and Audiobook Nibbie at this year’s British Book Awards.


MIKE MCCORMACK Novelist and short story writer McCormack shot to prominence in 2016 with his novel Solar Bones. Issued by Irish independent publisher Tramp Press, it picked up the Goldsmiths Prize—awarded for experimental and boundary- pushing pieces of writing—and was named Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.


LISA MCINERNEY The Glorious Heresies, released in 2015 by John Murray Press, was McInerney’s first novel. Not a bad introduction, either: it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize, a £10,000 bounty for début writers, in 2016. Her second novel, The Blood Miracles, was issued in 2017.


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