Your first novel, The South, was completed in 1986 but turned down by many U.K. publishers and not published until 1990. In this period, however, you went on writing and The Heather Blazing and Homage to Barcelona, were published not long after The South. Was it difficult to continue writing in the face of rejection and uncertainty during the period 1986-1989? Do you remember what any of those early rejection letters said?

Yes, it was difficult. Not difficult to write. I knew the novel was good and I suppose I believed that those who turned it down were fools. Both John McGahern and John Banville had read it and they said it was ok. They both wrote to me. So, since they were the two people I was reading, I took that very seriously. I just went on working on the second novel, despite the fact that the first was being turned down. (Bad Blood and Homage to Barcelona were commissioned.) I’m not sure if I would have gone on for ever, had each novel been turned down, but I might have. Recently, the guy who turned me down first and would have been a perfect publisher, asked to see my next novel. I told my agent not to show it to him. The second editor who saw The South held it for two months and then lost it, not having read it. She didn’t even apologise or ask to see it again. I see her sometimes. She doesn’t know that I am the guy. Macmillan said that they did not want to do the book, but if ‘she’ wrote anything else they would like to see it. Robin Robertson, whom I know now and like, turned the book down twice, holding it for two months each time. The book was finally published by Serpent’s Tail, who were marvellous, I ended by being published by Macmillan for almost twenty years but by Peter Straus who was not the editor who thought I was a girl. (He is my agent now.) Andrew Motion, who was also an editor somewhere then, said I wrote too like Joyce. I could go on. It is all very fresh in my mind.

Have you ever had an important mentor or teacher? Somebody who helped you to become the writer you are?

In boarding school, I had an English teacher (who had been John Banville’s English teacher) and a Latin teacher. Both of them told me that I was able to write and were very kind about what I was trying to do.

You went to the Christian Brothers School in Enniscorthy and the final two years of your schooling took place at St Peter’s College in Wexford. What was your experience of school?

I disliked my teachers at the CBS and I think they disliked me too even though I did nothing special. They disliked all of us. One of them picked his nose all the time. It was hard because my father was a teacher in the secondary school while I was in the primary school. He died the summer before I would have been his pupil. I was no good at anything. Teachers would arrive and think I was going to be brilliant, but it wasn’t long before I got found out and they would start to insult me. All this changed in St Peter’s. It was a totally different atmosphere. Teachers, or most of them, had respect for you. It got a very bad name later for sex abuse. I think this is a pity because it was, most of the time, a good place and I learned a lot there. I learned to live away from home. But that was just for starters.

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