Meet the Author: Colin Barrett

Colin Barrett is an Irish writer, published since 2009. He started his career with the 2009 publication of Let's Go Kill Ourselves in The Stinging Fly. Barrett released one novella and six short stories with Young Skins in 2013. He released an additional eight short stories with Homesickness which was published in 2022.

Barrett received multiple awards for Young Skins. These included the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2014. Two of his works were made into plays for the New Theatre, Dublin in 2017 while Calm With Horses debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.

His latest work is a novel, Wild Houses, which was published by Jonathan Cape in January 2024. You can find Wild Houses and Colin's other work on our catalogue.

Who were your influences as you were growing up and did you have books around you as a child or use a library?

When I was very young I read voraciously and indiscriminately. Read anything I got my hands on. Comic books, children’s books, now and then an ‘adult’ novel left around by e.g. a visiting aunt. Mostly I used my school libraries. I’m a dad now and a member of my local library along with my two kids. They are 7 and 4 and love getting books out.

When did your interest in writing really develop and who encouraged you?

I could draw as a kid and took my inspiration from comic books I was reading. Superhero ones, but also those old adventure story/boys own ones that often found their way to our house via charity shops. I found I had an innate impulse for narrative. I was attracted not just to emulating the drawings in those stories, but also doing my own versions of the stories themselves.

It's nearly 10 years since the award winning collection Young Skins was published. How do you look back on it now as your debut novel is published?

I did the best I could with it at the time, so am proud of it in that way. And it’s a similar story with Wild Houses. I did the best I could with it.

Can you tell us a little about Wild Houses?

It concerns the small town kidnapping of a teenage boy named Doll. Doll is taken to the house of a reclusive, strange young man named Dev. Doll’s girlfriend Nicky is the one left trying to figure out what happened to Doll. The kidnapping plot provides an overarching structure and an internal dynamic to push the story forward. But the main thing, as always to me, is exploring the inner life and viewpoint of my characters.

One of the key themes in Wild Houses is the way 'everything twists together'. Everyone in the town is interconnected. Is that something you have seen elsewhere or is that something you have particularly observed in Ireland?

There are exceptions, but in general, you can’t have a story-whether that’s an anecdote you tell someone over coffee, a short story, or a novel- without more than one person/character appearing in the story. Stories are dependant on social units, social formations. They explore the mores and etiquette and rules, overt and implicit, of those social formations. I like that about stories. Writing into the social aspect of the characters, which is to say, their interrelatedness. You can do it in any setting, but rural Ireland happens to be the one I know best.

Two characters in Wild Houses who really resonate are Dev and Nicky. When did you find their 'voices' in the novel?

It took a long time to actually finish the novel, but it was always rooted in the characters, and I had Dev straight away. Doll too, and Nicky, though both of them took some more tweaking. But the essence of the characters was always there.

What is next for you?

You finish one book, you got to start another, that’s just how it is.

The one book that you keep returning to?

A cycle of books I’ve read and reread recently are by the US author Tom Drury. The End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams and Pacific are all set in the same small Midwest Iowan town, following a bunch of characters as nothing much extraordinary happens to them over two decades. I first read these 3 books around 2015 and have read each of them 2-3 times since. They are – or feel – perfect.

The best advice you were ever given?

Calm down.

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

I don’t drive.