Colin Barrett interview: 'Becoming a writer was always an abstract notion'

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book  

Like almost all my previous work, Wild Houses is set in a small town in the west of Ireland, right up against the tearing relentlessness of the Atlantic. It feels like one of the edges of the world, a place of tight knit, stoic community and, if you are careless or unlucky, a place of impossible loneliness. Dev, the first character we meet and the character I first started writing the book around years ago, is a reclusive young man cursed by just such luck.   

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

I was 15, maybe, idly browsing my Irish secondary school poetry anthology Soundings, when I came across T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It was jagged, volatile, provoking and elusive, with a creeping unseemliness and sense of danger stalking its opening sections. It seemed to be a poem about a guy who was, unequivocally, a loser. It just wasn’t like anything I’d read before. I thought poetry – writing, art etc – was supposed to be stately, serene, assured. This was something different and it changed me.  

The book that made me want to become a writer  

I’d wanted to be a writer for a while – though it was always a very abstract notion, essentially a daydream – but when I read Kevin Barry’s first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, I discovered a writer writing about a world I recognised, and doing it with vivid abandon and assuredness. It gave me inspiration, permission almost, to write about the world I knew.  

The book I return to time and time again  

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is a book that seems to exist on its own plane, or series of planes, forming a remote and crystalline structure that seems to only incidentally tolerate human presence, and that structure seems to shift, reconfigure itself, each time, if you could call it time, you return to the book. Time is the thing, because once I’m back there, in the landscape of To the Lighthouse, I feel like I’ve always been there, and it feels like it’s the rest of it – all this – that’s the dream.  

The book that impressed me the most  

All of Tom Drury’s trilogy; The End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams, and Pacific. He does so much with such gentle concision and leaves his characters and the stories they are enmeshed in open to interpretation in a way few writers have the nerve to do. He respects his reader so much.  

The book I’m reading at the moment  

I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger for the third time since its publication in 2022. It’s a book about last things, unbearably austere and beautiful at times, but also shot through with a self-aware, gleefully self-parodying streak. McCarthy decided to have a lot of dark fun at the end. It’s not for everyone, but dear God in heaven it’s for me. 

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack was longlisted in 2017. It’s a humane, domestic, loving book – a book about an ordinary, ordinarily flawed, good man – told in an audacious way. It is very special.