'Between Dog And Wolf' helps Rahill come of age at last

ELSKE Rahill is perturbed. She’s brooding about the first review of her debut novel. It was glowing, and said the 31-year-old was “an intriguing and definitive voice of a new generation of Irish writers.” But Rahill is hard on herself.

As a teen, she acted in short films and in Fair City; at college, she acted at the Gate and Abbey theatres. She refused auditions, because acting no longer felt relevant, so why does she rate herself a failure? Rahill has written two plays; the first, After Opium, when she was 21, the second five years later. Both were staged, the first in the Project, the second in Bewley’s Cafe, but she dismisses them both.

Why do actors write? “If you want to act and to write, you need a combination of ego, and an interest in other people. I used to get a real buzz getting into another person, and it’s the same with writing. It’s a good exercise in understanding other people,” she says. She’s pleased with Between Dog and Wolf — it’s a sensational novel — but says she is a slow writer, and the novel took seven years to get published. But she has parallel achievements: degrees; work; and two sons. So why did the review make her uneasy? She says the reviewer didn’t ‘get it.’ “I really wasn’t trying to write a college novel, or despatches from college. That is the setting, because when I wrote it that was my environment.”