Irish novelist, Audrey Magee (author of The Colony) talks to John Hagan about her literary influences, the Irish language and bringing her work to the screen.
JH: Who were/are your major literary influences? AM: That would have to be Marguerite Duras, the French writer I read for the first time as a 16-year-old. I had been reading all the usual Irish, British and American writers but here was a woman who created space for me as a reader. She did not spoon-feed me, did not tell me what to think, how to think, what to feel; instead she created, through spare but beautiful writing, a space where I could think for myself, feel for myself, a space where I could be an active reader, a participant in the experience of creating a world with words. After her, it has to be Camus and Beckett. I love Beckett for his sparseness, his distillation of huge issues into a fragment, sometimes even a sound, an utterance. With Camus, I always return to his capacity for blending narrative into great political and social novels. I still read a lot of French writers. It is probably the space where I feel most at home as a reader. JH: If you were not a best-selling author, what would you be doing with your life? AM: That is a big question. I am happy when I am writing, even though the things I write about are often difficult. I enjoyed my time in journalism (Ireland Correspondent of The Times, roving reporter with The Irish Times covering the war in Bosnia, child labour in Pakistan and Bangladesh) as I am by nature
48 | THE IRISH SCENE
a wanderer who loves talking to people. But I needed to go deeper than journalism allowed, deeper into language and into the issues of what it is to be a human being framed by different political and social systems. Novel writing gives me that space, and I am profoundly grateful to have that space, that capacity to explore what it is to be human. If I wasn’t doing this, the reality is that I would probably be in Poland or Romania or Moldova, on the border with Ukraine, talking with refugees as they flee their homes, abandoning their former lives. Reporting remains a very important job. Hearing from these people first hand and telling their stories remains a vital part of our humanity. JH: Jean-Pierre Masson, one of the principal characters in The Colony, is dedicated to saving a fading Irish dialect. Are you also concerned about preserving threatened language? AM: I am a linguist. My first degree, from University College Dublin, was in French and German language and literature. I also studied linguistics as part of that degree. But I am a linguist who does not speak Irish, who, like Joyce and many other Irish writers, turned her back on Irish in favour of English and the languages of the Continent. Why is that? Why did I do that? Why did so many other people my age despise and shun the language? Theoretically it is only a language. What harm can a language do? Unfortunately, language is
