Sarah Harte returning to her love of fiction

LOATH to describe herself as a vocational writer as she thinks that’s pretentious, Sarah Harte says her need to write is “more like a disease.”

Having published two novels with Penguin in 2011 and 2013 which went to numbers one and three respectively in the Irish book charts, Harte is moving away from “upmarket commercial fiction” (which was Penguin’s categorisation of her books) and developing a distinctive and more literary voice. Her short story, ‘Submerged’, about a middle-aged closeted married man, won this year’s Bryan MacMahon Award at Listowel Writers’ Week.