Her Troubles-set debut became a hit TV series starring Gillian Anderson. Now the novelist has returned to her teen years for a follow-up. She talks about her journey from chef to author, and how her cancer diagnosis inspired her to write
Louise Kennedy’s life has hardly wanted for dramatic events, but the recent past has been spectacularly busy, even by her standards. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, as we chat in the sitting room of the house in Sligo that she shares with her husband, son and daughter, but this is the home that she once thought would be repossessed. The couple bought it “for stupid money” in 2007, when they also opened a restaurant, initially so successful that the only way seemed to be up. The following year, financial mayhem descended on Ireland, their customers ebbed away, and the Celtic Tiger years morphed into a country racked with job losses, bankruptcies, apparently endless debt. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to keep the house,” she says, glancing around an elegant room dotted with beautiful objects and plants, but nonetheless relaxed and comfortable. “I’d say we only got out of negative equity about a month ago. There are probably arguments for moving now, but I’m so proud that we managed to hold on to it, I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be carried out of here in a box.”
Kennedy had been a chef for 30 years, working all over the place from Dublin to London and, for two years, Beirut, before ending up in Sligo, on Ireland’s west coast, not far from the border with her native Northern Ireland. Crucially, she had never given a thought to writing, not since a teacher had admired a poem she wrote when she was seven. Now, she is about to publish her second novel, Stations, which follows a collection of short stories, The End of the World Is a Cul-de-Sac, and her debut, Trespasses, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s prize for fiction and won other prizes in Ireland and the UK in 2022 and 2023. Last year, Trespasses gained further acclaim when it was adapted for Channel 4 in a production starring Gillian Anderson as the mother of Cushla, the young Catholic teacher who falls in love with Michael, an older, married Protestant lawyer, in 1970s Belfast.
