[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” da_disable_devices=”off|off|off” global_colors_info=”{}” da_is_popup=”off” da_exit_intent=”off” da_has_close=”on” da_alt_close=”off” da_dark_close=”off” da_not_modal=”on” da_is_singular=”off” da_with_loader=”off” da_has_shadow=”on”][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font_size=”19px” text_line_height=”1.3em” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n
17 January 2023<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font_size=”19px” text_line_height=”1.3em” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” link_font_size=”19px” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin. His novels include Star of the Sea<\/em><\/a>, Ghost Light<\/em><\/a> (Dublin One City One Book novel 2011) and Shadowplay<\/em><\/a>. Among his awards are the Prix Zepter for European Novel of the Year, France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi, an American Library Association Award and the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature.<\/p>\n His work has been translated into forty languages. In 2014 he was appointed Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. Joseph’s latest novel, My Father’s House<\/em><\/a>, is published by Harvill Secker on 26 January 2023 and is also available from the Suffolk Community Libraries catalogue<\/a>.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font_size=”19px” text_line_height=”1.3em” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” link_font_size=”19px” sticky_enabled=”0″] <\/p>\n What was your first exposure to books as you were growing up and when did it first occur to you that you could write?<\/strong><\/p>\n There were always books in the house \u2013 novels, short stories, fairy stories, works of history, the Ladybird books, Just William, Agatha Christie, the folk tales of the Irish writers Sinead de Valera and Lady Gregory (I grew up in Dublin), ghost stories, collections of Edgar Allan Poe, and there were albums of Philip Larkin\u2019s poetry read by the poet and of Dylan Thomas\u2019s work read by Richard Burton – but my first real sense of wanting to be a writer myself happened powerfully one night when I was six or seven and my dad was watching \u2018The Odd Couple\u2019 on the television.<\/p>\n At the end, among the credits, was the fact that it had been written by Neil Simon. I genuinely think that until my father explained to me what a playwright and a screenwriter did, I sort of thought actors made up the words as they went along. So, I was entranced by the idea of Neil Simon and thought his occupation was just the most wonderful way to spend your time. After that, I worked hard on being a better writer, by being a committed reader and learner.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You have spoken about your time working in the Sunday Tribune office alongside all those great writers. That must have been a wonderful apprenticeship for you as a writer?<\/strong><\/p>\n It was an immense blessing that, as a teenager in first and second year in college, I got summer jobs working at the Sunday Tribune newspaper and Magill magazine in Dublin. Their offices were more or less across the street from each other, and the most extraordinary collection of writers came and went between them: Colm Toibin, Fintan O\u2019Toole, Gene Kerrigan, Nuala O\u2019Faolain, Mary Holland, Nell McCafferty and others.<\/p>\n To be around them and to see how they worked was a brilliant education. It left me with the most useful ability any writer can have, in that I don\u2019t wait for the muse, I\u2019m able to write to a deadline and a wordcount. I\u2019m hugely grateful to have been in the presence of such marvellous writers at a young age. They cared, rewrote, worked on getting the words right.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Star of the Sea<\/strong><\/em><\/a> was published in 2002 and sold a million copies. How did it change your life and how do you look back on Star of the Sea<\/em> twenty years on?<\/strong><\/p>\n Star of the Sea<\/em>, which all these years later still sells around the world, in more than forty languages, was the sort of experience every writer should have at least once. A pure pleasure. I continue to be deeply proud of the book, which I wrote for my children. It was the first book of mine where I had to become a better writer in order to write it. It taught me a huge amount.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Can you tell us a little about My Father’s House<\/strong><\/em><\/a> and what the experience of writing it was like?<\/strong><\/p>\n Monsignor Hugh O\u2019Flaherty\u2019s heroism in Rome during the Second World War is gripping and inspiring. It always had the makings of a tense psychological thriller, and that\u2019s what I hope I\u2019ve written. A novel in the same vein as Star of the Sea. But there are other nuances and meanings to his story.<\/p>\n Born in republican north Cork, brought up in County Kerry, he came of age around the mistrust of England that was one tragic bequest of history. Yet he came to live insistently by his own moral code, even when faced with the threat of death, and at the risk of being ostracised by his Vatican superiors.<\/p>\n In siding with the British prisoners of war to whom he was called to minister in the fascist prison camps in Italy, and in assisting thousands of them to safety when they escaped and fled into Rome, O\u2019Flaherty revealed himself as a person who wouldn\u2019t blindly follow orders, whether they came from friend or enemy. Complaints were made about him by the Irish government, whose policy was strict neutrality, but he ignored them, saving the lives of some 7,000 British and American prisoners.<\/p>\n As for the experience of writing the book, I approached the technical aspects in pretty much the same way that I\u2019ve approached all my novels since Star of the Sea<\/em>. I write a fairly complete outline and draw it out on a sheet of A3, using a sort of schematic I\u2019ve adapted from the Syd Field screenwriting paradigm, and I pin that to my office wall, but then I revise, reshape, mess around with it for a while. I\u2019ll draw maybe six versions, never throwing any of them away. When I have a shape that I feel I can work with, I feel freer, and my chapters and sequences become more explorative. I\u2019ll do that for a year or so, then write the final version.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How did you first come across Hugh O\u2019Flaherty\u2019s story?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m not positive as to when and where I first heard Hugh\u2019s story but I think it may well have been in the town of Listowel, County Kerry, in the southwest of Ireland, where there is an annual literary festival. I\u2019ve been attending for thirty years. At some point, someone told me about a man from Kerry, Hugh O\u2019Flaherty, a Catholic priest in the Vatican during World War Two, who saved thousands of people from the Nazis.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Is there anything you can share with us about your latest project?<\/strong><\/p>\n My next two books (I\u2019ve started the first of those) will be about members of the Escape Line nicknamed The Choir that appears in My Father\u2019s House<\/em>. The book I\u2019m working on now, entitled The Operation<\/em>, has the Contessa Landini as main character, and the next one, called Legal Tender, will feature John May, jazz saxophonist, pre-war Soho frequenter, and butler to the British ambassador in Rome.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You have spoken about the musicality of words, and you have a wonderful ear for dialogue. Do you still have that freedom to pass unnoticed and listen to characters now you have become well known?<\/strong><\/p>\n Very few writers have the sort of fame that means they\u2019d be recognised in public, and I\u2019m hugely happy to say I don\u2019t have it myself. I think fame is the worst sort of curse because it comes disguised as a blessing. There\u2019s certainly a lot of music in My Father\u2019s House, as there will be in the next two novels also. This is because the characters in the books are always trying to work collaboratively for the Escape Line, and I think the greatest things we do are all collaborative in nature. Especially music.<\/p>\n Even a solo performer is working in collaboration, with the people who came beforehand in that musical tradition, like in folk or blues, or the people who built the instrument, as in classical. And, of course, all musicians are working with that most important collaborator, the listener. To me, words are sounds before they are anything else. The novelist writes the sheet music but it\u2019s the reader who sings the song.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What is the book that you return to most of all and why?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m hugely fond of Lucky Jim<\/em><\/a> by Kingsley Amis, Toni Morrison\u2019s Jazz<\/em><\/a>, all the novels of Elizabeth Taylor, True History of the Kelly Gang<\/em><\/a>, and Oscar and Lucinda<\/em><\/a>, both by Peter Carey, my writing hero. I return to all of them often but don\u2019t return to any of them as often as I come back to Aretha Franklin\u2019s recordings for Atlantic, the choral music of Palestrina, or the works of Muddy Waters, my all-time favourite works of art.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You spoke very vividly about the first time you heard Patti Smith’s Horses LP describing it as ‘the world bursting into life’. Do you still get that feeling in new novels or music?<\/strong><\/p>\n I love the music of how people speak \u2013 I find I\u2019m always listening out for different accents and phraseologies \u2013 and any work that is in part driven by how people speak will always have pleasures to offer. For that reason, I continue to be excited by songs, ballads, the blues, spoken word poetry, and, lately, the amazing verbal dexterity and linguistic skill of stand-up comics like Stewart Lee and Tommy Tiernan, who are such extraordinarily gifted storytellers.<\/p>\n I also adore the comedy work of Monica Geldart and Hayley Morris on TikTok. They are such brilliant writers, full of truthfulness, but laugh out loud funny. Hayley Morris has a book coming out soon, and I can\u2019t wait. She\u2019s fearless and hilarious in what she writes about.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?<\/strong><\/p>\n I love reading but I get bored easily. I very often don\u2019t finish a book. I find that this bad habit is growing worse as I get older. I just think, nah, there are still so many great novels and Bessie Smith blues tracks I\u2019ve yet to get to. If I\u2019m not grabbed within the first ten pages, I\u2019m out.<\/p>\n What else? In 1985 I was arrested in Nicaragua for visa violation, and I spent a day in prison. But that\u2019s another story.[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider _builder_version=”4.27.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_divider][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dublin-born award-winning author Joseph O’Connor talks to us about his latest novel My Father’s House and the impact that music has on the written word.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":40191,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meet-the-author"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n