‘I picture myself out in the garden with a shovel and I'm digging for feeling. And when I hit the feeling, that's when I get the shiver; it sends a jolt through me.’

“Poverty and precarity sneaked up on me in the stories. Poverty takes up so much mental bandwidth. It affects all my characters.”

“These stories have taken time – one took four years and probably went through 82 drafts – and only two have been published; very few journals want a 12,000-word story about a man who identifies as a vampire.”

“Writing is where I go to think, it’s where I go to feel. Generally, in my everyday life, I don’t know how I feel. It takes me about ten years for things to digest. My emotional metabolism is slow.”

12-minute interview with RTÉ Arena, August 2023.

A 30-minute interview recorded in August 2023. Also available on Spotify.

“I was going to bed at five, waking up at one, and even if you get eight or nine hours sleep, it’s not the same sleep. Your perceptions get skewed: you hear and see things differently. It was like I was living behind glass. “

An interview with the Irish Times Literary Editor, Martin Doyle.

“It’s no coincidence that so many stag-trippers get team jerseys made up for themselves. There’s always a strong sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’, and there being an opposition to take on – it could be another set of lads, or it could just be the waiting staff at a restaurant.’”

“She has an uncanny ability to hone in on what’s not working in a piece and then just express that clearly without being proscriptive. The classic question of “showing or telling” also hovers over editors, I think.”

An interview with my former lecturer, Philip Coleman.

In which my ex-girlfriend, Gillian Moore, interviews me.