WHAT BOOK?
...are you reading now?
I’M reading Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton, alongside Topographica Hibernica by the wonderful Blindboy, because I always have a novel and a collection on the go at once, and love a bit of satire and humour in my literary semi-fiction.
The Australian Dalton snaps me into the action from the get-go with his bittersweet portrayal of life as a savvy child under the care of drug dealing parents.
And Blindboy? Well, who knows where Blindboy is going half the time, but we gallop alongside him anyway, caught up in the fizzing frenzy of it all.
...would you take to a desert island?
I’D take Hagitude by Sharon Blackie, a lyrical and heartfelt treatise on what it means to be a wise older woman. Cult writer of If Women rose Rooted (September Publishing, 2016), Blackie’s latest work would help me accept my lot as solitary crone on that desert island, keeper of hens and grower of herbs, caster of runes and reader of the landscape and the weather.
I feel she’d encourage me to enjoy my time of isolation as one where I allow myself to be transformed, so that I’d return to collective living in full flower, at the best of myself, ready to help and heal other.
... first gave you the reading bug?
I’VE lived all my life in Narnia. No wardrobe got me here, just years of living among the soft rolling hills and drumlins of Lecale in Northern Ireland. It was in this magical place that CS Lewis saw fairyland, over one hundred years ago, and the captivating Pevensie children were born from the local landscape of Strangford Lough which stretches its fishy length all the way down from its head at Newtownards to its tail at the Irish Sea.
The soft velvet hummocks of little islands can be seen all along its edges, with the promise of dragons and talking animals behind every spindly tree and windblown bush. My first pet was a white mouse, liberated from the school labs, and his name was Reepicheep
. . . left you cold?
I’M not afraid of Virginia Woolf, but I can’t enjoy her writing. Throughout school and university I was exhorted to read about her dinner parties and her lighthouses but I find her stream of consciousness stuff irritating, and never do get to the end, even though her works are famously very short. I do feel this marks me as a philistine in the literary world, but also that I do not care.
■ ROISIN MAGUIRE is an award winning writer of short fiction and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Queens University in Belfast. Her debut novel Night Swimmers (Serpent’s Tail) is out now.