Literature review: Cork Short Story Festival
William Wall is an illuminating conversationalist. In the first author interview of the Cork International Short Story festival he ranged across subjects as diverse as his love of islands from West Cork to Italy, his latest novel Grace’s Day, and why, after being offered, he refused to become a member of Aosdána — an organisation he believes should be more outspoken on political and social issues. But it was with the unusual origins of his writing life, at age 12, that he surprised the audience in the atmospheric Goldie Chapel at Nano Nagle place, when he explained how an attack of juvenile arthritis left him confined to bed for a year, and how the gift of a typewriter from his parents, intended to stop his hands ‘turning into claws’, encouraged him to write. He had written 15 short stories by the time he turned 13.
