Tish Delaney: Love in a time of Troubles, Tyrone, and cultural upheavals
Author Tish Delaney on the Channel Island of Alderney where she lives, which like Tyrone’s landscape, intricately connects with her writing.
TWO pages into this book you know you’ve unlocked something special. You abandon an effort to minimise reading in order to savour the experience by finally battling your way relentlessly to the end of Mary Rattigan’s story. Then, you pick it up, and start reading it again.
Advice often dished up at writers' courses (unless you’re writing a sci-fi novel set in some dystopian future) is ‘write about what you know.' For author Tish Delaney this came to roost, as, after attempting to write a novel set in her adopted home London, she finally gave in to writing about what she really understood, the world in which she grew up and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Asking herself 'Who wants to read about small farms in Northern Ireland?' in the end she conceded 'Well, it seems there’s an appetite for it after all.'
