Novelist and Critic: Rathcoole native Kevin Power delves into his upbringing

Novelist and critic Kevin Power delved into his upbringing in Rathcoole in a lecture he gave at the Bray Literary Festival last year.

The arresting lecture, later published on ‘The Stinging Fly’, looked at the craft of writing, and Kevin’s adolescence as a budding writer feeling restricted by the grey and unexciting environs of suburbia.

A past pupil of Holy Family Community School, Kevin is a successful writer who has released two well-received fiction novels and, most recently, a book of literary criticism.

His work has been positively reviewed by The Guardian and has been shortlisted for awards including the Eason Irish Novel of the Year and the Dalkey Book Festival Novel of the Year.

Kevin, who is also an assistant professor of literary practice in Trinity College, told The Echo about his experiences as a writer, his back catalogue of work, and his perception of Rathcoole.

Was there a particular book that you read when you were a child/young adult that ignited your desire to be a writer? What about it made it resonate so strongly with you?

There’s a bit at the end of Roald Dahl’s memoir ‘Going Solo’ where he talks about being a writer.

I read this when I was eight or nine and it was the first time it struck me that books were written, and that therefore people wrote them, and that I might become one of those people: in retrospect, probably the most important realisation of my life.

You published your first novel, ‘Bad Day in Blackrock’, in 2008. Can you remember how it felt to release your debut novel, and did the experience match your expectations?

Having daydreamed about publishing a novel throughout my adolescence, I assumed that I would be psychologically prepared for the experience.

But I wasn’t.

Publishing a successful novel at 27 was in many ways the worst thing that could have happened to me.

I spent quite a few years feeling bewildered and angry – angry, I suppose, that the experience didn’t at all resemble my daydreams, and in fact took place in the real world, over which you have no control.

I got worked up about all sorts of things that wouldn’t bother me at all now – people disliking the book, and so on; people viewing me with a sort of hostile curiosity – what was my angle?

All of that. It took years for me to feel safe writing fiction again.

In the meantime I found myself becoming a critic, of sorts – again, something I didn’t expect.

You released your second novel, ‘White City’, in 2021 which was positively reviewed by The Guardian and was shortlisted for the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards. What are your thoughts on the response the book received?

On the one hand, every novelist expects to receive the Nobel Prize as soon as their latest novel is published.

On the other, you cleave to an almost pathological modesty – secretly hoping no one will ever read it, so you can write something better next time.

I was lucky, ‘White City’ met with a very warm response. And, of course, I’m older now.

I know a bit more about what’s important, what’s worth taking seriously, what you can safely ignore, and so on.

Your most recent book, ‘The Written World: Essays and Reviews’, is a collection of essays and reviews that you have written. What prompted you to release a book of cultural criticism and essays on the process of writing?

Books of criticism are my favourite sort of book! And I realised that, over the last decade or so, I’d written a book’s worth of pieces and essays that I liked, and that felt, to me, worth preserving.

Criticism is less exciting to write than fiction, but I enjoy being a part of the ongoing conversation about literature and culture – it’s a wonderful way of thinking about the world.

You gave a lecture, commissioned by ‘The Stinging Fly’ and delivered at Bray Literary Festival last year, that looked at the craft of writing and your own adolescence in Rathcoole.

Why was it important, to you, to explore your experience of growing up in Rathcoole in the lecture?

I realised, as I turned 40, that I’d been giving that side of myself short shrift – ignoring and repressing a lot of material to do with where I grew up, what sort of place it was, what sort of person I was and am.

It occurred to me that I had been using writing as a way of rescuing myself from certain parts of my experience that I disliked or didn’t want to think about.

And I think that, if you want to grow, you have to turn back and look at the material that you’ve been ignoring or repressing.

The lecture was an attempt to do that, in the hope that it would be useful to other writers as they wrestled with their own difficult material.

Kevin Power’s books are available at liliputpress.ie. For more information, follow @KevPow3 on Twitter.