![]() ![]() ![]() In 1981 I left Northern Ireland, a place of very overt hostilities compounded by covert ones, to live in Wales where the surface is relatively calm and the conflicts deep. Well, I hadn’t “got my ear in” to the accent at that stage. It was very good of my husband to marry me because at our first meeting I greatly offended him by asking what part of Scotland he came from. It’s hard not to bump into the English when encountering the Welsh. My mother said he fought against the English and was “in Shakespeare”? ![]() I saw it every day from my bedroom as a child. In fact, I married the first one I met – apart from those soldiers on Belfast’s High Street with the wee silver leek in their berets and Owain Glendower who had a street in east Belfast named after him. Most of the 26 stories are set in Northern Ireland or Wales. It has recently been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. My short story collection A City Burning emerges from that double life. This double life has stretched me, sometimes painfully, but that creative tension has fed into my work. For decades I have been living in two places at once – at least in terms of imagination. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |