Colin Sheridan: Sally Rooney is leading Ireland's cultural renaissance

A surreptitious reading of 'Normal People' kicked off COLIN SHERIDAN's discovery of contemporary Irish culture

Four years ago everyone — South African writers, American academics, Tunisian activists — was asking Colin Sheridan: 'You’ve read 'Normal People', right?' 

The spring of 2019 seems a lifetime ago, not least because the time in between has been dominated by a global pandemic, a climate crisis, too many horrific wars to remember, and enough natural disasters to fill two decades.

Such entropy has seen the world thrust into an existential spin, and only reinforced what privileged lives we lead, especially in Ireland, when we can turn to the arts to comfort and steady each other — to remind ourselves that, as Hemingway put it, “the world is indeed a fine place”, and worth fighting for.