Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and Salman Rushdie feature in this collection of over forty award-winning writer interviews.

This is a genre-crossing collection of writer interviews and essays that recounts in intimate detail encounters with many of the world’s foremost writers. Interspersed are photos as well as a charismatic commentary, provided by editor and veteran journalist Ciaran Carty, revealing a surprising, often unexpected interconnectedness between these otherwise distinct figures.

Individually, these pieces provide a rare glimpse inside some of the world’s most creative minds; collectively, they address topics such as history, politics, sexuality, and class, while also reflecting the distinguished and wide-ranging career of one of Ireland’s leading critics and broadcasters. Filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes, personal confessions, and passionate declarations, this book is the definitive collection for literature enthusiasts and aspiring writers alike.

Featuring:
Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, John Banville, JG Ballard, Anne Enright, Carlos Fuentes, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Heller, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Johnston, Molly Keane, Michael Longley, Norman Mailer, VS Naipaul, Edna O’Brien, Tom Stoppard, Paul Theroux, Fay Weldon, Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney and Salman Rushdie, and more.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

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).