INTERVIEW

The British Council, Bangalore hosted a discussion on the works of authors shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 as part of its Literary Lounge sessions in July this year. The prize was finally awarded to the Irish writer Lisa McInerney for her debut novel The Glorious Heresies, which also won this year’s Desmond Elliot Prize and has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year award.

Q. Characters appear in all novels. The characters in walk into the reader’s life as though they were your next- door neighbours, right from the word go: “He left the boy outside its own front door. Farewell to it, and good luck to it.” What is your own relation with the characters in your novel?

The Glorious Heresies A. I feel very close to the characters in Heresies. So many of them have been in my head for so long — a decade, in some cases — so I feel like I know them very well. They’re not based on people I know in real life, although perhaps aspects of people I know are reflected in the characters. And some of the issues they find themselves dealing with are issues that have, in the past, affected people I love. I think to an extent all writers borrow from reality, whether intentionally or subconsciously; we are driven to try to understand people, and so we get quite invested in the intricacies of other lives. I think too when the writer has spent years forming characters and getting to know their quirks and flaws, writing about them feels very natural. Most of the work is done in the writer’s head.

Q. There is some online reports on how you attempted to write 1,000 words a day, thought about your characters when you were out running and never started early… What did you see when you went running in the mornings? How did these sights mould you into a novelist?

A. I run in the woods near my home, usually early in the morning when there are very few people there. So the route is a quiet one, and should provide a great opportunity for thinking things over. The problem is I’m a very bad runner, so instead of mulling on plot or characters I think about how much further I have to run! I find walking is much better for “novel work”; I listen to some music that reminds me of my characters and I walk through the town or city, people-watching and letting my imagination drift along.

Q. Tell us about growing up in Ireland — your early years and your life now.

A. Ireland’s changed a lot in my lifetime, though of course for most of it I was too young to notice. I was born in the ’80s to a teenage mother, and was immediately adopted by my grandparents because even in the 1980s, children