Letter from the Editor

Blurbs, puffs, teasers — some of the words used by newspaper folk to describe the panel above or below the masthead, the one that seeks to sway floating buyers and tempt them inside. We call it the skyline and much consideration goes into what makes it up there. Today, all three skyline offerings are interviews — two of them with writers. In this section, Niamh Horan has lunch with the Booker Prize-winning John Banville — and it’s a captivating read from start to finish. Banville is one of those rare interviewees who seems incapable of resorting to obfuscation — or blandness, as Niamh puts it — when a tricky question is put their way. At one point, when being pressed for his views on the transgender controversy still swirling around his fellow author JK Rowling, Banville suggests our journalist is trying to get him cancelled. Not that he’s bothered, telling Niamh: “I’ve been trying to get cancelled for years, but nobody cares.” For me, it’s a joy when an interviewee speaks with such refreshing abandon, along with piercing insight and a willingness to discuss deeply personal matters in a way that seems to me entirely authentic. So hats off to Banville, who, after venturing where very few would dare to tread, concludes that he might just have succeeded in being cancelled after all: “There I am — gone. I’d better have another drink as I sink into cancellation.” The other writer making the skyline is the bestselling Sheila O’Flanagan, who is interviewed for the People & Culture cover piece by Sarah Caden. It’s a very different but also highly enjoyable encounter with a leading Irish writer. One of the characters in O’Flanagan’s new novel is a struggling writer who wins the Booker Prize for a romantic novel. It’s a plot that allows the author to, as Sarah puts it, “drop in small nuggets of her own attitude and experience in a world she has inhabited for nearly 30 years”. One of O’Flanagan’s arguments is that when men write about emotions, they’re lauded “and yet women are doing that all the time and it’s just, like, ‘Oh well. Emotions’.” Another woman writing about emotions with verve is Nancy Harris, whose TV series The Dry