‘I picture myself out in the garden with a shovel and I'm digging for feeling. And when I hit the feeling, that's when I get the shiver; it sends a jolt through me.’

The five stories’ recurring themes are troubled masculinity, punishing poverty and magical thinking, fantasising or catastrophising, as characters reach a crisis point. “Poverty and precarity sneaked up on me in the stories. Poverty takes up so much mental bandwidth. It affects all my characters.”

“These stories have taken time – one took four years and probably went through 82 drafts – and only two have been published; very few journals want a 12,000-word story about a man who identifies as a vampire.”

“When I get to the end of a story and I feel some kind of tingle or something in my arms or my chest, because I’m so driven by feeling in my work, it means I’ve hit something real for myself.”

12-minute interview with RTÉ Arena, August 2023.

A 30-minute interview with Neil Denny, recorded in August 2023. Also available on Spotify.

“When I came back home last summer I was living in a different time zone to my mother. I was going to bed at five, waking up at one, and even if you get eight or nine hours sleep, it’s not the same sleep. Your perceptions get skewed: you hear and see things differently. It was like I was living behind glass. “

An interview with the Irish Times Literary Editor, Martin Doyle.

“I think a lot of fiction just tends to ignore work and working life – perhaps because it’s not seen as literary, or perhaps because the writers themselves haven’t had ‘jobs’ in a long time. So when a book comes along that does describe characters going around, having jobs, I think some reviewers project themselves into things and go, ‘Ugh, I wouldn’t want to do that job. This story must therefore be about how awful these jobs are.’”

A Q&A with my then-Faber editor, Hannah Griffiths

An interview with my former lecturer, Philip Coleman.

In which my ex-girlfriend, Gillian Moore, interviews me.