New Laureate for fiction Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: ‘I was part of a movement of women writers of Ireland'

Irish Times

5 days ago

It is typical of
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's
modesty that she was delighted even to be shortlisted for the €50,000-a-year role of Laureate of Irish Fiction. This week's news of her appointment, succeeding
Colm Tóibín
,
Sebastian Barry
and
Anne Enright
, has left her 'overwhelmed'.
It feels like 'even more of an honour', she says, than her PEN award for an outstanding contribution to literature, the Hennessy Irish Writing Hall of Fame award or her appointment as Burns Professor at Boston College.
More pragmatically, she observes that another difference is that it involves 'a fair amount of responsibilities and duties. It's a very public role. You don't just grab the medal and walk off.'
This laureate will not be resting on her laurels. While she is still discussing with the Arts Council the details of her three-year programme, one idea that appeals to her is visiting every county to celebrate its distinctive literary heritage.
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As a bilingual writer, the daughter of an Irish-speaking father from the Donegal Gaeltacht who grew up speaking Irish in Dublin, she will also be promoting literature in Irish, 'which I've already been doing thanks to The Irish Times', a reference to her reviewing work, which she thinks helped raise her profile for the laureateship.
'People believe they can't read a book in Irish, that it's too difficult, but it just takes a bit of effort. Even when I'm reading, I would come across words every couple of pages that I'd need to look up, but it's a lot easier now with the internet. I've been learning Bulgarian for 10 years (she has a Bulgarian daughter-in-law) and have to look up a word on every line. I know that sounds a bit schoolmarmy.'
Ní Dhuibhne has already done her bit to popularise reading in Irish by writing a bestselling series of crime novels as Gaeilge, beginning with Dúnmharú sa Daingean (Murder in Dingle). 'People told me they'd never read a book in Irish before and were surprised that they could.'
Ní Dhuibhne is a most versatile author, having written more than 30 books, in both Irish and English, for children, adolescents and adults, spanning novels, short stories, plays, memoirs and literary criticism. Although her best-known work is probably The Dancers Dancing, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction (then known as the Orange Prize) in 2000, her preferred form is the short story.
Prof Margaret Kelleher of UCD, in her introduction to the Ní Dhuibhne's Selected Stories (Blackstaff Press, 2023), praised 'their incisiveness and wry humour, and her keen eye for the incongruous and the familiar made strange'.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne at home in Dublin. 'My short stories are closer to my true personality.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
'When I'm writing at my most serious and deepest, it's the short story,' Ní Dhuibhne says. 'When I'm writing for younger people, it's made up completely, although the stories do end up with something of you in them. My short stories are closer to my true personality.
'The short story is a focus on a moment of truth, when the veil of reality is lifted for a moment to reveal a deeper truth. Because it is short, it has a connection to time which is more controllable. Shelley described inspiration as like a spark to a coal, which begins to fade as soon as you start writing. With a novel it fades on day one and you have to keep rekindling it. With a short story it doesn't have time to fade. You can grab the energy of inspiration and get it drafted before it's gone. That's why short stories can achieve a sort of perfection it's almost impossible for a novel to achieve.
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'The only guideline I like about short stories is that something has to happen to someone on the surface, a dramatic incident of some kind, and something has to happen underneath, an excavation, what the meaning of the story is.'
And yet the short story is, for many readers, the poor relation to the novel. 'Readers like to get lost in a story, immersed,' Ni Dhuibhne says. 'They don't like dipping in and out, just getting to know a setting and the characters and then it's on to the next one.' That's why she feels long short stories are the most successful, more like short novels.
The Dancers Dancing, a coming-of-age novel set in an Irish college in the Donegal Gaeltacht, that uniquely Irish rite of passage, grew out of a short story, Blood and Water, after Dolores Walsh, a fellow member of her writers' group, told her she could get a novel out of it.
'It's about a group of girls who go from Dublin to Irish college and it explores the relationship of the English- and Irish-speaking worlds, the urban-rural divide. My main character Orla is in a slightly challenging position. She is not a complete outsider as her mother's family is from that area, she has lots of relatives there and is ashamed of them.
Old stories have a luminosity and beauty, a wildness of imagination that can be lacking in contemporary life
—
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
'Orla doesn't yet accept the wholeness of her personality. This teenager is trying to navigate a way through middle-class Dublin life and this other side of her, poor Irish-speaking people in Donegal. That arose from my experience as a child and teenager. I aspired to be more upper class than we were. Quite a lot of my fiction explores the connection between past and present, our ancestry.'
She is not sure she can describe her voice as a writer. 'Maybe I'd aspire to make it intimate, very gripping. I have quite a comic voice, I'm at home with irony.'
Ní Dhuibhne has also spent many years teaching creative writing, at UCD, Trinity, Boston College and the Irish Writers Centre. Her pupils included Colin Barrett, Henrietta McKervey, Andrea Carter, Jamie O'Connell and Jessica Traynor.
The new laureate has a rich literary social life, with a lot of writer friends. She has been in the same writing group for 40 years now with authors Catherine Dunne, Lia Mills and former minister of state Liz McManus, among others. It started as a national Irish women writers' workshop set up in 1985 by Eavan Boland, to address the underrepresentation of women's voices in Irish literature.
Ní Dhuibhne studied folklore at university alongside English and is now president of the Folklore of Ireland society. The old stories are a big influence on her own writing.
'That is one of my characteristics. I often counterpoint contemporary, modern stories with a folk legend or tale. It gives a different dimension, a deepening.'
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne at home in Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
The first time she did it was with Midwife to the Fairies, the story of a secret birth, in which a midwife goes to a fairy hill and assists with the birth of a child. The other inspiration was newspaper reports about the 1984 Kerry babies case.
'Perhaps it was a way the community had of telling reality in a coded way. I am a folklorist, I do it to offer an interpretation of the old story. On the other hand it gives depth and lustre to what might be a thin little story without it. Old stories have a luminosity and beauty, a wildness of imagination that can be lacking in contemporary life. These stories have survived for centuries because they have some attractive quality.'
Ní Dhuibhne's Irish-language memoir, Fáínne Geal an Lae (Clo Iar Chonnacht 2023), tracks her childhood until the age of 12 in 1966. 'It ends on a very optimistic note with the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Rising. My sister and I were lucky with the time of our birth, just in time for free secondary education and grants for university. I wrote it during Covid when everyone was writing memoirs. My life was so different to my children's, I wanted to document it.'
Her other memoir, Ten Thousand Days, addresses
the death of her husband Bo
in 2013, and their lives together. Was its purpose to process or record? 'In the first instance, the former, to process my feelings of devastation and grief at the loss of my husband, but also to record the story of our relationship.
'Bo's death was very difficult, traumatic and horrible. It does take some years, but gradually one gets back to being myself. I think of Bo and I miss him in various ways but I feel healed. Writing the book certainly helped me get through the first three or four years but the real healer is time.'
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Her grief was also channelled into two superb short stories, The Coast of Wales and New Zealand Flax, commissioned by Sinead Gleeson and Belinda McKeon respectively for anthologies. 'I couldn't write about anything else. That was the only thing I was thinking about. They are examples of stories I would not have written if I hadn't been invited to.'
Ní Dhuibhne has had two great influences in her writing life, Canadian Alice Munro and Irish feminist and LGBTQ+ activist Ailbhe Smyth.
Back in the 1980s, soon after she had married and had two children, Ní Dhuibhne joined a women's studies forum that Smyth had set up in UCD. 'She opened my eyes to cultural feminism, the facts of literary history, that there weren't as many women writers as there should be. I had been blind to the facts. I did English at UCD without realising we only read three women (Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte and Jane Austen) in three years. It was consciousness raising.
'I could have let writing go but it became more than a matter of self-expression or personal ambition. It seemed I was now part of a movement of women writers of Ireland. It took off and now we have gender equality in fiction. Women are no longer ignored. There is no way you could have a syllabus these days that excluded women.'
Munro, the late Canadian author, 'showed me a way of writing about the past and connecting it to the present' through her stories about her ancestors. 'It definitely influenced Blood and Water. Before that, my stories were really corny, probably because I wasn't linking past and present, just taking my father's anecdotes and trying to transform them into literary stories.'
Munro's mesmerising, intimate style pulled her right into the story and her protagonists' unpretentious lives. 'It seemed artless, though obviously was not at all. I loved her luminosity the way she handles time, the way her stories spread out and are not tight little stories focused on one thing. I learned a lot about composition from her.'
A wry, dry humour is another of the laureate's trademarks. The Literary Lunch, a satire on self-serving members of an arts organisation dining for Ireland, is her most popular story. The Arts Council must have a sense of humour too.
'Perhaps they haven't read it,' she laughs. 'I know everyone thinks it is based on the Arts Council but it's not at all. It was inspired by another committee.'
As well as the late English comic writer David Lodge and Samuel Beckett's bleakly comic novels, she was weaned on an Inter Cert anthology featuring Somerset Maugham and Saki.
Finally, why should people read fiction?
'It's hard to answer that without sounding trite,' she says, 'but it is the best way of getting inside the head and heart and personality of other people, total empathy. I think that is its trump card in art. It's so entertaining, you're entering into the lives of other people. In fiction there is an intimacy of contact with humanity, it's psychologically insightful, it teaches you something.'
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne will be in conversation with Niall MacMonagle at a free public event in the National Library, Dublin, on Tuesday, September 16th at 7pm.