Intimacy with Strangers offers a dazzlingly original, thought-provoking approach to celebrity interviewing.

Ciaran Carty draws upon a career involving many of the world’s leading writers, artists, actors and directors as they explore intimate concerns, ranging from love and rejection to the smallest physical sensations of pleasure and pain, and to the great issues of politics and war, God and atheism – the big and small of the human condition. Interweaving recent cultural and social history, Carty exposes unexpected affinities shared by his eclectic cast of subjects.

Through chains of happenstance and six-degrees-of-separation, Intimacy with Strangers mirrors the cinematic cuts, fades and dissolves of its author’s sensibility as film critic and writer. By creating this magical memoir, Ciaran Carty offers an idiosyncratic portrait of a kaleidoscopic Ireland in a global setting.

‘…this anthology from veteran arts journalist Ciaran Carty is a hybrid creation. He seeks to blend serious art and populism, but, it is the searing insights from his more highbrow interviewees that most command our interest.’ – Alan Murdoch, Sunday Times

‘Intimacy With Strangers is rich and rewarding; there is definitely a filmic quality to the narrative (to be expected from a writer who has devoted much of his life to the big screen) but it also has plenty of unexpected moments from an eclectic career spent talking with the greats.’ – Joe O’Shea, Irish Independent

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Since incurring the wrath of his first editor in 1960 by making Hitchcock’s Psycho his film of the year, veteran cineast CIARAN CARTY has consistently championed the arts, developing a career as one of Ireland’s leading critics and broadcasters. He was deputy editor of The Sunday Independent (1961–65) before becoming arts editor for The Sunday Tribune (1985–2011). Since 1988 he has edited the New Irish Writing page for both the Tribune and the Irish Independent, and is curator of the prestigious annual Hennessy Literary Awards. He is the author of Confessions of a Sewer Rat (1995), a two-volume biography of the artist Robert Ballagh (1985, 2011), and has co-edited, with Dermot Bolger, two anthologies of Hennessy fiction (1995, 2006). A sequel to this book, Off the Map, A Geography of Other Minds, will be published by Lilliput in 2014.