My life in books: ‘Amongst Women’ ... Reading it makes time feel like it’s fallen away
Niamh Campbell won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2021. Her latest novel, 'Make Strange',is out now.
Niamh Campbell’s debut novel was nominated for the An Post Irish Book Awards, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, and the John McGahern Book Prize.
She won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2021.
Originally from Dublin, she now lives in Clare. Her latest novel, , published by W&N, is out now.
by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, which I have been lost in, and a textured, contemplative memoir called by Colin Graham: Both introspective and lush, but on different planes.
by John McGahern. An odd choice but like comfort food to me; I know it by heart, practically, because I spent years thinking and writing about McGahern’s particular kind of atmospheric, but minimalist, realism.
Reading it makes time feel like it’s fallen away.
. I mean, I hardly even started it. I was just in the room while someone else read it.
See also — I was in the room while someone else ranted about that at length, so I kind of feel I can comment on it now.
by James Joyce. I borrowed it from Fingal County Council library so many times throughout my teen years I was, rather embarrassingly, formally banned from borrowing it again.
It had a huge influence on me, in terms of style and approach.
by Madeleine Gray, partly because it is so warmly upbeat about unconventional parenting, and I need that kind of moral support.
by Claire-Louise Bennett. It is difficult to explain why, but it got under my skin — Bennett’s work combines passion with melancholy in a very specific, peculiar way.
by Matthew Lewis. A friend who specialises in Gothic literature assured me this was excellent, and it is — mincing, far-fetched, and hysterical.
I read it and gave people blow-by-blow updates, like a soap opera I felt highly invested in.
by Matthew Salesses opened up the teaching of creative writing to me. I find teaching what I do difficult, but this is demystifying and also quietly radical.
Patrick Radden Keefe does Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle. Patrick, if you are reading, this is your sign.
I mean obviously it’s . Though you should probably take a course or class and read it in company — it’s such a fun book to share.
(2005), in which Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote with a brilliant combination of deadpan and childlike. I’ve never forgotten it.
Books Upstairs. I remember it as an eccentric, mezzanine-filled discovery of my adolescence, with a prominent erotica shelf you could peruse in the days before smartphone smut.
Diabolical chaos. I don’t respect books. I break spines, write in biro, harvest them for craft ideas, and frequently give them away.
Coffee, like really morbid and reckless amounts of coffee. On an empty stomach.
This is also how I write. It produces a form of euphoria which suddenly breaks and ends after about 1.5 hours.
Lady Wotton, in , is summed up in one zinger: “She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.” This haunts me.
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