Because when he really stopped to listen, he heard the whisperings of The Queen of Dirt Island. He doesn’t seem too bothered by what happened, or obsessed with all those hours and words potentially wasted. Part of the irony was that the book that didn’t work out was his longest yet. It turned out that the Tipperary native had experienced something that’s not uncommon among authors – he had written a different novel, but realised at the end of the process that it just wasn’t working. “I feel real affection for it, because I wrote it fairly quick in a bit of a bind, because I had gone past deadline.” “I do actually ,” the Booker Prize-nominated author acknowledged of his sixth novel. “My sister said: ‘When you go on the radio talking about your books, you’re always slightly negative about them it always sounds like you don’t quite like the book, you know? Just don’t do it this time, because I know you love this book’,” he laughs, as we sit under the gaze of a painting of Samuel Beckett in the back of Dublin’s Bestseller café (yes, you can guess the theme). When The Journal asked him this week how it feels to have his latest work out in the world, he told us. DONAL RYAN MIGHT be one of the country’s most beloved contemporary writers, but when it came to promoting his new novel The Queen of Dirt Island he needed a dose of sisterly advice.
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