Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne agreed to be interviewed via e-mail by Nicola Warwick.

NW: Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Orange Prize. It must have been exciting to have been part of such a prestigious award. Can you tell us about the events surrounding the Orange Prize--in particular it would be fabulous to hear more about the readings at the Hay Festival and the event at the V&A (Victoria & Albert Museum in London)?

END: It was a great honour to be shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and one which was completely unexpected. I felt particularly pleased because my novel, The Dancers Dancing, is so concerned with Ireland and Irishness. It was gratifying that readers in another country were interested in that.

The prize-giving weekend was marvelous. I arrived in Hay-On-Wye after a rather arduous journey from Dublin, to be brought into a festive, brightly decorated tent, have a glass of champagne thrust into my hand, and be introduced to Norman Mailer, his wife and several other internationally renowned writers. It went on from there. I'd never been to the Hay Festival and loved the splendour of it, the huge scale, the crowded schedule, the celebrities. The marquees, the flowers, the champagne. It's a very lively literary festival, a real celebration, and run by the most friendly, warm people. The village, in its setting by the river, is exquisite. I loved it. I wanted to stay there, for ages and ages.

But after less than twenty-four hours I was on my way to London. On the train, I made friends with some of the other shortlisted authors, Elizabeth Strout and Linda Grant, and this good-humoured friendship was very sustaining over the London leg of the prize-giving. (I had not read their books at the time but have since, and was deeply impressed by both. They are excellent novels, profound and beautifully readable. I feel I was in the best of literary company on that short list).

The two London events were the reading at the British Library, and the Prize-Giving Party at the V&A. As a veteran of readings, at libraries and elsewhere, to which about ten people turn up, some of them the readers' mothers, I was pleasantly surprised to see notices outside the British Library saying "No More Seats for Orange Readings" or words to that effect. And people actually paid to get in! In short, the level of interest was pleasingly high. And the readings went well--better probably than at Hay, since we were all getting into our stride. It's always good to read two days in a row. Writers need dress rehearsals, just like any performers. Usually on the first day I'm thinking, proudly, "I'm a writer, not a performing monkey . . ." On the second night, I'm coming around to the view that perhaps I am a performing monkey, after all.

The big night was the Prize Giving Party at the V&A. This event was indeed nerve-wracking. "Might I possibly win?" was a question which caused me a certain amount of anxiety. I had never expected to win but then I had not expected to be on the long list, or the short list. The "Who knows?" factor was coming into play in a big way. By the time the big night arrived, I had in any case floated off into an unreal and fantastic world, a sort of fairyland where anything could happen. This was not just thanks to the champagne, which seemed to be spouting out of magic springs all over Wales and England that weekend, but thanks to the heaven of Hay, the excitement of London, the glittering company. The fun of the whole enterprise. The second question, which aroused even more anxiety was "what will I wear?" In the event it was a very glamorous party, informal but highly stylish (as London is, I think--Dublin literary social life is lively, sometimes brilliant. But it is never well-dressed--to put it kindly. In London people have style. I had the wrong dress. I know it. It was suitable for a barbecue or a school bazaar in south county Dublin but not for the midnight extravaganza that took place at the V&A. (But I got a lot of wear out of it all summer, so not to worry.)

The party was lovely. A sort of Arabian Nights dream, in the fairy-light strewn garden of the V&A. Not winning hardly seemed to matter. I came back to Dublin "with magic in my eyes." People kept saying how sparkling and confident I was. The whole experience boosted my morale tremendously--which says a lot for the spirit of the Orange Prize.

NW: What is the inspiration behind The Dancers Dancing? Does it reflect your own life experiences?

END: It's only partly related to my own experiences. The setting of the novel in the Gaeltacht, the Irish speaking region of Ireland, is something I experienced, but the characters are not based on real people, to any extent. The novel is, to put it simply, about some Dublin teenage girls who go to the west of Ireland to learn Irish at an institution known as "Irish College". I think this particular institution is a very interesting one, unique, and quite central to the experience of many Irish adolescents. In reality, as in the novel, it tends to be a rite of passage experience. Often it is the first time that Irish children are separated from their parents for any length of time. (We don't have a very strong boarding-school tradition.) But although "going to the Gaeltacht" is such a seminal teenage experience here, it has seldom, if ever, been described in any depth in literature. So I thought it would be a good idea to do that. I also wanted to explore various issues relating to Irish language and cultural identity, and used the novel for this purpose. Finally, I wanted to write about the wildness of young girls on the brink of adulthood, on their attraction to risk and danger, and about their affinity with the natural world.

NW: How long was The Dancers Dancing in the making? Was the book planned in outline first or did it evolve as you wrote?

END: It took years to write. Originally it was a short story, "Blood and Water" (the title story of my first book). I expanded this to a long, unwieldy novel. Then I cut back a great deal of that and reduced it to the shape it now has. Yes, it evolved as I wrote. Although I always have a plan, starting off on a novel--I couldn't bear to face the blank page without some sort of map--I rarely stick to it. The ideas flow from the writing. Somehow I think with my pen, or my laptop. Maybe that is why I am a writer.

NW: Your first story was published when you were 19. Have you always wanted to write and what compels you to write?

END: I have wanted to be a writer since I was eight or nine. Before that I wanted to be a nun. I was a quiet, timid and dull child with an obsessive interest in reading. Perhaps I read to escape from the dullness that was me. Anyway I just read all the time and since I loved books so much I thought I would like to write them myself. Naturally as a result of my constant reading I was good at writing in school (I could not have been otherwise--I lived in the realm of the written word). I got every encouragement from teachers. I have noticed that English teachers are often very enthusiastic and intelligent--they are often the very best teachers. I assumed I would be a writer all along, through long years of school and college. But I got side-tracked--I stayed in college for about ten years, learning various medieval languages and doing endless research. That was a wonderful time. I loved being a student and a researcher. But it used up most of my creative energy, and my time. I did not get around to publishing my first book until I was about thirty. It happened soon after I got my Ph.D. and had my first child--both events liberated me, somehow, and left me free to concentrate on my writing (although having a baby doesn't exactly leave anyone free to do anything, in practical terms, psychologically it seemed to be significant).

NW: Your writing encompasses a wide range of genres: poetry, fiction, plays, children's books. Do you have a preferred genre or do you enjoy the variety?

END: I prefer short stories. Short, but getting longer.

NW: Given your job as a librarian, books must play an important role in your life. Which writers inspire you and what are you reading at the moment? Have any writers influenced your own writing?

END: My library work, oddly, does not involve much work with books. I work in a manuscripts department and deal with historical documents of one kind and another. Sometimes the manuscripts are literary, but usually they are not.

Writers who have inspired me include Charlotte Brontë, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, Edna O'Brien. I love Halldor Laxness' Independent People, one of the great, not well enough known, novels of the world (although Laxness did win a Nobel Prize, so he has got a certain amount of attention!). Contemporary writers whose works I always rush to get include Richard Ford, Alice Munro, John Updike, and David Lodge (whom I adore--making people laugh is a great gift). And I should not forget Margaret Drabble, one of the first modern woman novelists I read, as a student and apprentice writer, and for whom I have a great admiration. She has influenced me, in certain ways. I wish she'd write more novels!

I deliberately used Passage to India as a sort of structural template for my first novel, The Bray House. It's completely different from Forster's book, but I thought Forster had a great way of structuring a novel, and I learned a lot from examining his work closely.

NW: What sort of schedule do you adopt to fit your writing around work? What motivates you to write and how do you maintain the discipline?

END: I don't have a full-time job--I work half-time in the library. So I write on my week off. I don't feel I'm very disciplined. I never get up at five am to write, for instance. But when I have a day at home, I write. It's what I want to do. So far, I have always had something to write about. Stories come to me. People tell me stories. The world is choc-a-bloc with them. I think I have what might seem to some people an inflated sense of the significance of what we call ordinary life. It doesn't seem at all ordinary to me. People's mundane experiences fascinate me. I want to describe them, perhaps in an attempt to understand how the world works. But there is an imperative to record: I feel like an historian of the emotional and psychological life of my time. I want to write it down, so that people will know how it was.

I am also motivated by my love-hate relationship with Ireland, which I find a rather extraordinary country, full of contradictions and anomalies. It seems to be a country which demands to be written about.

Of course I am prey to other demands, too. For instance, my children and my dahlias. The children tend to take care of themselves nowadays, but increasingly I have to stop myself from working in the garden, an addiction which is getting a grip on me in my middle age. Cultivating a garden is like writing a book. But I must keep reminding myself that it is not writing a book, and when I'm weeding I'm not writing. Writing means sacrificing other pleasures. Quite a lot of them.

NW: Some of your work has been published under the name Elizabeth O'Hara. Was there a specific reason for using a pseudonym at that time?

END: I used that pseudonym for my children's books. There were two reasons. One, to distinguish them from my adult books. Two, to use a name that someone would be able to pronounce. This is always a help when trying to buy a book. (It was my grandmother's name--and Eilis is the Gaelic form for Elizabeth.)

NW: What do you dream of achieving in terms of your writing? What is your greatest ambition?

END: To write one really good book.

NW: What is the best advice you have ever been given about writing?

END: To be honest I don't think I've ever been given any advice that made much sense to me. I think most writers don't know why they do it, or how they do it. When asked for a gem of wisdom, they produce glib gobbets like "glue your pants to the seat of your chair." Yeah, right! And then?

But I am more than happy to dole out glib advice myself. The advice I would give to any aspiring writer is to live, feel, read, think, and write. Then think some more, write some more, think again, write again. Write write write. Persistence is very important, in writing as in every endeavour.

Nicola Warwick is the author of life's little luxuries. She lives in Manchester in the North West of the UK. Nicola's articles have been published in various writing, computing, and electronics magazines. Read more about her here.

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The Orange Prize for Fiction, 2000
Order The Dancers Dancing from Amazon.com.

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