naoise blog 3

Happy weekend—I hope everyone’s been enjoying the festival. On Friday there was an event in conversation with my Italian translator, Claudia Durastanti. She did an excellent job with my novel and I’ve been really pleased with the Italian reception. My publisher Edizioni Atlantide came up with a beautiful cover and has been amazing to work with. It’s one of the first translations to be released, so I’ve seen reviews and have had a few interviews around Italian publication. Typically they email the questions in English, I reply, and they translate my answers and write it up.

I did one such interview yesterday. I always find it interesting talking to international readers about Irish writing. Non-anglophones generally have fewer preconceptions around Irishness, because Ireland’s diaspora is mostly concentrated in Britain, North America and Australia; so while those countries have inherited perceptions of ‘the old country’ from Irish immigrants, the rest of the world views us with fewer assumptions, if they view us at all. (We’re really small. I don’t think other countries appreciate how small we are. Not even five million people! Why does anyone know about Ireland? Why do the Irish even know about Ireland?)

Speaking of the diaspora, another thing I worked on yesterday was an article about a project by photographer Tami Aftab, who’s Irish, Pakistani and English. Her grandmother left Ireland as a teenager, and Tami made the journey back with the women in her family to complete a commissioned photography project. It’s a satisfying story because from what Tami told me when I interviewed her, her career as an artist is exactly what her grandmother would have wanted for her. As for many Irish people at home and further afield, creativity has run in her family for far longer than it’s ever been a feasible profession. My dad loves photography but never would have dreamed of trying to make a living from it, and my grandmother read voraciously but never had any notion of writing, so Tami’s story resonated with my own experiences.

My current difficulty with the piece is that I’m already at twice the word count because Tami spoke so passionately about the project. Once I’ve managed to cut the verbiage and save the good stuff, I’m excited to hand it in and share it, and for everyone to see her beautiful photos. I can’t believe this is a sentence I’m typing, but she’s made Leitrim chic. (My dad’s side are all Leitrim, so I’m allowed to say that and would bludgeon any non-Leitrimer who did.)

Besides that I’ve been signing bookplates and sending them back to my publisher to be distributed. I am no good at this sort of thing, and react with surprise and a degree of suspicion when I ever manage to pull it off. When I have to post things, I am forever convinced that some logistical disaster is just around the corner and I will have accidentally couriered my every possession straight to Moscow.

I’m also getting something very special ready to send my agent, but I won't say what. I think the dark hints I promised in my first blog post probably won’t materialise. I don’t know why I’m so secretive—it certainly doesn’t make me much of a blogger—but it makes it easier to get my work done, and that’s the main thing.