Beginner’s Pluck: Roisín O’Donnell

Brought up in England to Northern Irish parents, Roisín has always felt a sense of dislocation. A writer since she was small, she had completed three novels by the time she was 24.

“I wrote the first at 15. But I had no confidence. I didn’t show them to anyone.” In her final year at Trinity College Dublin she took a module in African Literature, and was blown away.

“Reading writers like Ben Okri opened the door to my own writing,” she says.