How does it feel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022, and what would winning the Booker mean to you? 
 
As a student in Dublin, I worked in Waterstones. Booker time was an exciting time in the shop, tables piled high with nominated books. That my book is now longlisted and on those tables is beyond thrilling for me. It’s glorious.
 
As to winning, that would be a wonderful gift for The Colony, a novel that explores the societal controls around colonisation and their impact on language, art, violence and self-determination. I tell the story from an Irish perspective, but the narrative echoes the experiences of other countries around the world where there is a relationship or the legacy of a relationship between the colonised and the coloniser.

Winning the Booker would hugely expand the readership of The Colony, and doing so might allow us to better understand those relationships and, potentially, through the power of fiction, reset our interactions with and interpretations of each other.
 
You’ve been a successful journalist before turning to fiction. What do you bring from your experience as a journalist to writing fiction? Is it a journalist’s curiosity and interest in seeking answers, or something else? 
 
I loved being a journalist, talking to people, hearing their stories, learning of their lives, sharing sometimes their darkest, hardest moments. It was a huge privilege. Journalism has a paradigm of its own and hunts for truth in its own way. It turned out I was searching for a different kind of truth; an essential, existential truth, one that I could only hunt for through fiction. I like to pull the lens back so far that I can see the links in our humanity - and inhumanity - and fiction provides me with the space I need for that kind of hunting and rummaging.
 
Mr Lloyd, the English artist who decides to spend the summer on the unnamed island, is constantly thinking about his art, always sketching or simply imagining his surroundings in artistic form. Did you have to learn to think like an artist in order to get into Lloyd’s head, and how did you do that? 
 
Yes, I did have to learn to see as an artist, to see the world as Lloyd saw it. I am not an artist, have never formally studied art, but have visited galleries and exhibitions since I began travelling as a teenager. To write Lloyd, I shifted from being the recipient of the artist’s perspective to being the creator of his perspective. To do this, I read widely - Van Gogh’s letters, biographies of Rembrandt, Cézanne, Matisse, Munch, Goya and, of course, Gauguin. And I studied, too, the works of Bacon, Auerbach and Freud, Lloyd’s competitors in the novel. I visited the works of these artists whenever I could; the most significant to the novel being the Gauguin exhibition in Basel, at the Fondation Beyeler, in 2015. I also spent some time with the work of Donald Teskey, an Irish artist who beautifully captures the vibrancy and vitality of the sea.
 
To write Lloyd, I had to put myself centre stage, to put myself in the middle of things so that the self-portraits and island series of paintings and drawings became credible. This was a very different but interesting space for me as a writer because I like to create scenes that unfold without me, scenes with room for the independent and engaged reader. It was not possible to create Lloyd like that. Everything was from his perspective. It is the world as he sees it; an attitude that marries well with the perspective of the coloniser.

The Colony has been described as a metaphor for Ireland and a fable about the effects of colonialism. Did you set out to create such a metaphor? Does the book feel more topical due to the effects of Brexit?  
 
It is a metaphor, yes; a metaphor for the island of Ireland, of course, but also a metaphorical distillation of the experiences of all countries colonised since the 15th century by Britain or other European nations.
 
On The Colony being a fable, I don’t really see it that way as the novel is too grounded in truth, and in reality, to be a fable. There is a moral code to it, obviously, but I see that influence coming from morality play rather than fable. I think of The Colony too as bildungsroman, where the principal character is Ireland, a young country emerging from colonisation by Britain only to turn to Rome to allow the Vatican to fill the void, to allow priests, nuns and bishops to impose their rules and interpretations on how Irish people should live, particularly Irish women. That choice has devastating consequences for Mairéad, the principal female character in the novel.
 
As to Brexit, I wrote The Colony as Brexit unfolded. It was a very distressing time in Ireland as we understood the impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland, and the risk of a physical border returning to the island of Ireland. Brexit has shaken the foundations of the Good Friday Agreement, a European deal that blurs the lines around identifiers like passports and religion. Brexit is a polarising force in Northern Ireland and is still challenging the British-Irish relationship, sadly exposing yet another generation to the themes and concepts of The Colony. 
 
The island in the book isn’t named - did you have somewhere specific in mind when writing it? 
 
I was very careful not to base it on a particular island but to create my own, an amalgam of the Irish islands of the north, west and south-west coast. There’s a bit of the Blasket Islands, a bit of Skelling, a bit of Aran, a bit of Tory, and some, too, of the many islands off the Cork coast. I did that to find the freedom I needed to write a metaphorical piece. To underscore that this is not any particular island, the dialect of Irish language used in the book is actually from the mainland. It is not the Irish language spoken on an island, but in Dún Chaocháin, a remote Irish-speaking community in north-west Mayo. To even further remove it from any particular island, the names of the three women, Bean Uí Fhloinn, Bean Uí Néill and Mairéad Ní Ghiolláin, are family names from across Ireland.