Ryan Cahill: Irish fantasy writer happy to ride the genre's rise in popularity
Ryan Cahill, Irish fantasy author, is about to have his books published by the Broken Binding.
Ryan Cahill knew he had made it as a fantasy writer when fans started sending him wooden spoons. “There’s a line in the first book, which is a very Irish line, where [one of his characters] says that his mother used to hit him with a wooden spoon of retribution. I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote that. Now my readers bring me wooden spoons,” he says.
The wooden spoon is a nod to the Dublin author’s Irish identity and the cliché of the angry mammy dispensing justice with a vengeful utensil. International readers of Cahill’s best-selling series — think Tolkien’s meets the scenes from — latched onto this detail.
