03-05-2025
Island memories — growing up in Ireland and Trinidad
Ireland and Trinidad may not seem to have a lot in common, but they both punch well above their weight in literary terms. Ireland's success hardly needs to be restated, but writers from Trinidad — the Caribbean island with a population of less than 1.5 million — have enjoyed huge international acclaim from the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul to contemporary prize-winners such as Monique Roffey and Claire Adam.
Amanda Smyth may have a winning combination, then: she's Irish and Trinidadian, and the author of three earlier novels, the last of which, Fortune, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Now in Look at You, which has a photograph from her youth on the cover, she has turned to what
