The Changes Q&A - Donal Ryan

Donal Ryan is one of Ireland’s most beloved and celebrated writers. He has published seven number one bestselling novels and a short story collection and won a mind boggling amount of literature awards including the European Union Prize for Literature, The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, six Irish Book Awards, and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Donal has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick since 2014 and lives in Castletroy with his wife Anne Marie and their two children. He writes about small-town lives. His books are incredibly grounded, championing ordinary people and finding real beauty and emotional truth in the everyday.

His new book Where Are The Kings, which is published today, is an unforgettable, funny, intensely moving novel about a young boy coming of age after the loss of his mother.

Where Are The Kings was the first book I read after eight solid months of reading women writers in my role as judge for the Women’s Prize. It was also the first Donal Ryan book I have ever read. The opening chapter, in which the main character Jack races down a hill on his bike to try and reach his Mother before she gets to the lake, landed me in a pool of questions and emotion. I was hooked from the very beginning. The book itself, is a journey through the mind of Jack as he grows into adolescence. It is set in an Irish rural town in Tipperary, in Jack’s Grandparents house, where he ends up living. There is so much colour and life in the characters of his big dysfunctional family, and so much humour throughout. The authenticity of voice is remarkable, how effortlessly Ryan seems to inhabit the character of this twelve year old boy with all his huge feelings and confused emotions. The sadness at the heart of it stunned me. Ryan handles his characters with such elegance and tenderness and compassion. I bawled at the end, I was yearning for the happiness of Jack. As Rachel Joyce said about the book

‘I think you have to truly love people to write like this’.

Please read Where Are The Kings and see for yourself. It will be one of the biggest Irish books this year.

In the meantime, Donal has kindly taken the time to answer the Changes questions this August. Thank you so much to him.

What is your relationship to the word Change?

I don’t like it. I prefer things to stay as they are. I keep things like cars and furniture for way too long. I’d still be living in my student flat if I hadn’t been coaxed out of it after ten years by my girlfriend, now my wife, because we were buying a house. And the rapid changes in my teenage children as they transmogrify into adults are terrifying. No, no, thanks, world, I’ll just keep them here in the house watching TV, thanks anyway. I’ve only changed careers once in my life - from civil servant to writer - and there was a long, long overlap. Change for its own sake is not something that appeals to me. I do get a little bit more enthusiastic about personal change when it’s for the better and for a good reason, like my weight or fitness, or my creative process. But overall I like things to move slowly and predictably in a set direction.

Who was the last person to change your mind and what opinion/perspective was changed?

A Green politician called to our door a few years ago and he completely changed my perspective on his party. He veered from patronising to obnoxious and back again a few times while failing abjectly to explain or justify any of their policies. He ended up telling me I was too stupid to understand, and I had to chase him off my driveway. I’ve always understood the obvious and immeasurable importance of caring for our precious planet, but I now understand that an optics-driven economic war is being waged on farmers and working people by a movement infiltrated by pompous blowhards, while the world burns. I understand also, obviously, that he’s just one person, but he was the face of his party at my door that day.

When have you felt the most ‘changed’ in your life?

When I first became a parent. The weight of my obligation towards this tiny new human sat itself squarely down on my shoulders and it felt so right, like an empty space I hadn’t noticed before had suddenly been filled. I hadn’t been prepared for the force of it, to be honest, the giant breaking wave of love.

What book changed you and why?

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar made me more aware of the capacity that we all have for masking our pain. Esther Greenwood’s voice is so beautiful and funny and profoundly human, and she is a brittle avatar for the writer. Sylvia was setting out clearly her intention. I adore that novel, and I think about it all the time, and I know this sounds strange but I mourn Sylvia Plath every time I think about it. And I wonder how no one was able to save her. Ah, but that is stupid, I know.

What change are you going through right now?

I’m getting older, like everything in the universe. I can’t sleep past 6.30am. I’m finding it harder and harder to read more than ten pages without conking out, though. Hair is starting to grow out of my ears and the top of my nose, having long ago deserted the top of my head where it’s needed most. I’m also, counter-intuitively, becoming less assured and confident as I get older. I’m more aware of my lack of true knowledge, I suppose, but that has the benefit of increasing my wonder about the world and the people in it that has always propelled me to the blank page.

What change would you like to make to your life in the future?

I’d like to stop craving carbohydrates, and maybe swear a bit less.

Buy Where Are The Kings HERE.