Many writers borrow Irish names or legends without retaining the cultural context behind them. What does Irish fantasy mean to you, and how did you go about this in Sister Wake?
Context is everything. Without it, you’re not exploring a culture, you’re mining an aesthetic. What I love about fantasy is what I love about the Irish literary tradition; not just an eye for detail, but an eye for how that detail shapes and binds and pressures a character and a culture.
Sister Wake is about being trapped on an island with your history, with what has been done to your history by others, and what, if anything, you can do to escape it.
Irish mythology is often taught almost like ancient history. How did that influence the way you approached integrating myth into Sister Wake?
Ambiguity, contradiction and alternate perspectives are very much at the heart of Sister Wake, and the history of Ireland as a whole. When the Lebor Gabála Érenn talks about a tribe of Gods arriving in a silver mist from across the sea – is that a myth, or history in disguise? When English and Irish historical accounts read so drastically different, can any common ground be found?
There is a kernel of truth in every myth - a human agenda, a fact, a fear – just as all history is a myth we tell ourselves. My three POVs in Sister Wake all seek to uncover the mystery of the Gods, but they are standing in very different places, and it’s only together that they might map the shape of that beast.
The story highlights how language and story can be eroded over time. What role do you feel the Irish language plays in the identity of the novel and its worldbuilding?
There are two languages at play in Sister Wake, one I know and one I don’t.
The first is Hiberno-English; that caustic and lyrical blend of Gaelic syntax and imposed English, perfectly tuned towards mourning, poetry and giving out shit about people around a table at 2am. If you haven’t read Lisa McInerney or Kevin Barry, seek them out – you are in for a treat.
The second is Irish itself. Like a lot of people, I resented having to study Irish in school. I didn’t see the point. It seemed, and was often called, a dead language.
But since beginning Sister Wake, and doing events with Irish authors who are fluent, their easy love and familiarity with the language made me realise what I was missing.
Language is context put to music. It is the way we used to think. It is our relationship with the land and our gods and our families. I read the books of Manchán Magan – an incredible love letter to the language. I heard our Laureate na nÓg say ‘as long as a grandmother whispers a language to a baby at night, it is not gone.’
And, of course, in the process of researching this book, I learned more about how it was institutionally suppressed. How it was feared and demonised, and how families hid in hedges to keep it alive.
I didn’t take the choice to include it in Sister Wake lightly. At first, I felt like a fraud. Like I was cheapening something damaged and sacred. But through conversations with fluent speakers and those experts kind enough to assist me with the Irish, I began to see it more as a reclamation. Language isn’t sacred. Like Hiberno-English, the joy is in the casualness, the coarseness, the mundane poetry along with the sublime.
And with my son starting school and his own journey with the language, I’m starting that journey along with them, and that feels like a reclamation too.
How did you balance the parallels between the Answering and the Croí with real Irish history without making the book purely allegorical?
A friend of mine is writing an Orson Welles biopic, and we were discussing the opportunities and pitfalls of trying to follow a real person and real events that do not often have a tidy or even satisfying narrative. What we eventually decided was that the you have to be able to lift the parallel or inspiration out and not have the story collapse.
You can’t assume the reader will know, or care about the history. You have to make them care about the story you are telling right now. A parallel can’t be a cheat code, or a short-cut. You have to do the work on the page.
Practically, what this has led to is my screenwriter brain taking over sometimes and keeping a few different pitches for the trilogy in my back pocket. If you know Irish history, it’s Irish history meets Elden Ring. If you don’t know Irish history, it’s Andor meets Elden Ring. These aren’t absolutes or one-to-ones, of course, but they’re signposts, and hopefully they lead people towards a thing they like.
Was there a particular aspect of Irish culture or history you wanted to spotlight or protect through this narrative?
There are so many, both big and small. You can’t find out the Irish used hens’ eggshells as shot measures and not include it, for example. On a grand scale, the rebellion follows aspects of the Nine Years’ War; the fractious blending of cultures, the English attempts to ‘solve’ us, the question of what freedom even looks like.
I also wanted to be sure to reflect the moral ambiguity and competing agendas of a time like this. It would have been easy and satisfying to write a simple good-versus-evil narrative, but in doing so I’d be leaving some of the most interesting elements of the conflict behind.
Sister Wake opens and closes every section of the book. How did you conceive of her role as the “heart” of the story, and what makes her the anchor of the trilogy?
One of the big questions of Sister Wake is what relationship the young are supposed to have with history; what responsibility they have to old conflicts and old grudges, particularly when they’re often the first to suffer.
I wrote the first chapter of Sister Wake in one go four years ago during the pandemic, and she arrived fully-formed and demanding an answer to the question.
She’s a human sacrifice-turned-saint, and no matter what power or validation or easy anger the world offers her, she never forgets almost ending up the price of freedom, instead of the recipient of it.
I think that’s exactly the person you need in a revolution.
Many readers note that their perception of the Irish gods shifts throughout the story. What drew you to portray the gods with such moral ambiguity and evolving menace?
I grew up Catholic.
What part of writing Sister Wake felt closest to home for you—myth, language, history, or something else entirely?
Honestly, it was the creature design. There’s a lot of Fromsoftware in the DNA of this book, and I very much subscribe to their ethos of binding pathos into the horror and spectacle of a monster.
My background is in writing horror and Doctor Who novels, so I love the challenge of acknowledging subject matter – Irish myth and thematic concern – but evolving it in strange and terrible ways.
Gods should be frightening after all.
Are there any characters that are your favourites? And why?
I am surprised by how much I’ve grown to love Prince Offrian of the Answering – a boy who is doing his best with the tools he has – but I’d be lying if I said anyone but Macha, Goddess of War, Queen of Summer and Sovereignty, because sometimes a two hundred foot tall woman with a horse’s head is exactly what a revolution needs.
Without too many spoilers! Can you share any teasers for what comes next? How do you see the characters’ conflicts shaping the second book?
Spoilers for Irish history, I guess but…
Things. Get. Worse.
(there is more fox cub though)
