voice-over: this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. some great writers thrive on distance. distance from the people, place and culture into which they were born. others stay rooted and observe from within. my guest today is an acclaimed novelist of the latter type. anne enright has lived in and around dublin, part of a close—knit family, for almost all of her life. she is undoubtedly one of ireland's greatest living writers, but to what extent has

her country shaped her fiction? anne enright, welcome to hardtalk. nice to be here. well, it's great to have you here. now, to an outsider, you do seem like a deeply rooted writer. that sounds so dull, doesn't it? yeah, no, ishould have gone places and done things, and i did a little, but, yeah, i returned to ireland. but would you acknowledge that those roots are hugely important to you? i pass the building where i was born when i go into town. so it is, it is quite close. yeah. it's fascinating because, just the other day, i interviewed a colombian novelist and he said to me,

"i only really was able to write about my country "and the things that really mattered to me when i left it, "when i had a little bit of space and distance "and freedom to actually express what i really thought." but you've always felt free enough from within. orfoolish enough — one or the other — to say whatever i wanted to say at any given time. yeah, um... ..so i think it was difficult in the deep past for writers to write from within the country. and a lot of people do thrive in exile. i like to...write about people who leave and come back. but there is an aspect of return in a lot of the fiction. and i live in ireland, but for a long time i was quite averse to writing as an irish writer, so i was kind of in contention with the tradition rather than writing from inside it. and also, you know, it is a relatively small country, in terms of population size, and it's quite intimate in that, you know, if you have

extended family, as you do, you tend to know a lot of people and you kind of meet them as you go about your business in dublin. was that ever constraining? because ijust note you did say, "when i started out," that is with your writing career, "there were critics in those days who were just plain nasty. "they were so nasty, they enjoyed it, "and they didn't mind that the irish middle classes "would wake up on a saturday morning "and read their hatchetjobs." yeah, there was a kind of tradition, a critical tradition of taking people down, one way or the other. and that was in... i mean, i think it was because of the difficulty and poverty of the �*70s and �*805 in ireland, and also because the poverty of ireland, as was, was always counterbalanced by our amazingly successful history—making writers. so, to say that you're a writer was to make a very grand claim. and those history—making writers, by and large,

if we are going back to the time before you started writing — i mean, you came of age sort of in the late �*70s, �*805 — but previously... ..it had been the great male irish writer. yeah, the great maled exile — i mean, the great exiled—male irish writer. yes. so was there a degree of, um... ..misogyny in the literary culture that you tried to break into? laughs good question! misogyny is very hard to...catch, isn't it? not really. not if you're suffering from it. sometimes... yes. yeah, i know, i mean, i do remember a kind of tone, locally, but like... ..like most irish writers, i made my reputation abroad. so i was writing into the uk, i was published in london, i was writing into the uk, into america — and in translation — for a good while before i was really taken on in the irish space... did that came as a surprise to you? it was really a strange thing. it was very interesting and it was a bit bewildering.

yeah. and so i didn't, i couldn't quite figure out what i was doing right or wrong. how come...? so i was publishing elsewhere, writing from within. but, you know, i never held back. i was never constrained by the people i might meet on the street. i do remember once... ..after i'd written the gathering in 2007 and i was bringing the kids down to school, and i was bringing them into the line in school. and this woman looked at me like i had done a terrible thing. and i thought, "what's that about?" and i thought, "oh, no, no, she's read the book," because the material is very strong, some of it very difficult, some of it, you know... ..it�*s not conventional or nice in any way. well, it's about... i mean, people who haven't read it, first of all, they should know it was hugely successful because it won a booker prize. it did, yes. one of the most prestigious literary prizes. but it was about an extended family which had a very dark secret,

and it was exposed after the suicide... yes. ..of one of the male members of the family. and it involved abuse and it was dark and difficult. yeah. and it said things about ireland and the way perhaps things over many years in ireland were covered up... yes. ..and shame was a huge impulse. do you think many irish people at that time felt you went too far? well, i did set some things running. you know, i did spark some difficulty in people. and some of the responses i noted as being slightly irrational and over the top. and i thought, "no, no, no, there's something else going on here," that i was stirring up some kind of sediment, personal or otherwise, that was causing people problems. didn't happen only in ireland, though. and it actually also happened mostly with men. i want to actually think about the way you write a little bit, because it's interesting to me that you didn't set out, in terms of your adult professional career, in the literary world.

you began in a place like this, a tv studio. you were in television for a number of years as a young woman. i was. why did television ultimately not suit you? so i had wanted to be a writer before i went into tv, and i was working weekends, trying to write short stories while putting out a live show three times a week, with many kind of multiple studio elements and all kinds of things going on. so it was very busy and i burnt out, basically, after four years and hit a bit of a wall. and, you know, i phrased it differently to myself over the years, but, ultimately, i kind of felt that i needed to get back to what i wanted to do, to a kind of authentic self or an authentic ambition. like, i found it really silly being ambitious in telly. it's, like, if you were really successful, you might do a silly quiz show. that makes me think hard about what i do. no, no! but let's leave that aside, let's just think about you. because television is quite a collaborative...

yes. ..exercise. and i just wonder whether, ultimately, you're a loner, in terms of your creativity. do you crave solitude? well, i have many voices in my head! i'm not alone when i have all my characters in my book. yeah, i started off in theatre, in student theatre, and then kind of professional and semi—professional theatre and went from there into tv. so i have those kind of skills of improvisation that really help when you're making things up. so i don't actually feel alone when i'm writing a book. there is an amount of company in writing a book. i feel actually sad when the characters are finished and done with and i have to leave them behind. again, because i've looked at various things you've said in recent years about the way you write, you did say about covid and the isolation that came to all of us, really, during covid. you said it was oddly wonderful, "because it reminded me of writing back in my 20s, "when i wasn't sure if anybody was ever going to read it. "i was just writing "and you don't really know what's going to come out." you said, "that removal of the outside world "that came with covid

was really helpful to me." yeah. i mean, ifeel bad enjoying the lockdown. i mean, it was a terrible time on so many levels for many different people. but it suited you? the melancholy of it and the largeness of the feelings and the... it felt... ..very profoundly meaningful. and the world was very vivid... ..and the work was quite private... if i may... ..which was wonderful. yeah. cos covid, i guess, was, in a way, the period in which you were writing this book, the wren, the wren, your latest fiction, which has, again, it's won prizes. it's been lauded around the world. but as we were talking about the gathering, this too... ..is quite a difficult book in some ways. i mean, it follows the story of two women and the man who sort of was so dominant in their lives. that is the poet, phil, who's the father of carmel

and the grandfather of nell. these two key women, mother and daughter. there's, um...there's abuse in this book, there's extremely difficult, sometimes toxic, relationships in this book. yeah. when you sit down and write, do you draw in personal experience? where do you draw these characters from? i have the most boring life you could imagine. i mean, i have had a boring life... i can't believe that. well, i write books. you sit alone in a room. i've written eight novels, you know, in the last 30 years. um... so that's a really interesting question. i take things from the world and i see where they can go, imaginatively or fictionally. um... you know, because there is an amount of dark subject matter in my work, i wonder why people find that so notable. and if i'm accused of writing dark material,

i feel like that's the equivalent of walking down the street and being told to smile, you know? women are expected to write consoling fictions or are admired for making people feel better. and male writers are admired for making people feel an awful lot worse, perhaps. anyway, these are the kind of boundaries that i'm interested in transgressing. and i like mixing things up. but it's not only dark, is also the thing. absolutely not. so i would just feel wrong... ..without that play of light and shade, i would just... it wouldn't feel true to me. everything about it seems to me to be nuanced, because you do have this dominant male character, philip. i mean, we don't see so much of philip, but we see the ramifications... he's not dominant. his absence is dominant. that's very well put. but there are huge reverberations and ramifications from things he did, his behaviours

that we learn about through the course of these women's lives. yes. and, as you say, it's about absence. it's about abandonment... it's about reputation as well. so the rupture was he left. but he's a poet and he left behind these lovely poems. so that's the remnant. he's also a dead character. he's not alive. he's not going to hurt them anymore. but he's left this work behind. but he was, you know, he both loved his daughter, carmel, but he also was abusive toward her at times. yeah, he was a bit chaotic and drunk. yeah. mm—hm. and then carmel, because what's then interesting — because this isn'tjust a question of sort of male chauvinism or domestic violence — carmel, who is a complex character herself... yes. ..she then, in one particular moment of anguish, is abusive to her daughter, nell, in a very graphic scene. i mean, i think many readers are kind of shocked by that scene in this book. it's woman—on—woman, mother—against—daughter violence. yes. and it's hard to read. was it hard to write? incredibly hard to write!

i also did the audiobook. i had to do about 30 takes to get through the passage. i find it deeply, profoundly affecting, yeah. um, and you know when you're writing something that is disturbing on that level that you're doing something right, actually. because perhaps you're entering an area of taboo or interest or...i'm very interested in how ordinary it is. so, i mean, the violence in the book goes back to phil's generation, where... not only domestically, it's kind of ordinary and usual, its kind of permanent state, but there is a kind of sacredness to... there's a scene of animal cruelty — just to alert everyone to that too! — where it's kind of ritualised, where violence is ritualised. so that goes through the generations. and by the time it comes to that scene that you're talking about, we know that it's not violence the way you see it

in a fiction, the way you see it fictionalised. we know it's terrible. we know it's real. we know... and i hope it's really affecting. and we know that there's the most enormous love there... yeah, no, i mean, it's a scene of great wrong. i mean, i wanted to... i mean, apart from anything else, carmel to me is a tragic character because she feels that she has failed as a mother and as a parent. but that's actually the commonplace tragedy of every mother on the planet, that the failure is built in. i'm glad you've taken it in that direction, cos you've written eight novels, but you've also written other stuff, including a book, a sort of fact book, a rumination on motherhood. yes. and you are a mother. i am. you've got two children. i have a mother — or i had a mother, sorry. how old are your children? my children are 20...nearly 2a and 21. and you sort of address — both in your fiction and in this book about motherhood — what is a good mother? and ijust wonder whether you think you're a good mother.

i'm a good enough mother, to quote winnicott. what does that mean? well, because, you know, uh... ..motherhood isn't all apple pie. it isn't all... it's a tough enough station, i think, as we call it in ireland. and mothers are often idealised. so how do you get over the idealised state of being a mother, which means that you must be lovelier in many different ways? 0r terrible! you know, there's so much projection and psychology around how we view motherhood. the work of donald winnicott, who was a child psychiatrist in the �*50s in england, and he got the phrase the "good enough mother". i mean, freud was blaming mothers for everything that went wrong with their children, full stop. and winnicott came in and allowed a little bit of human space...in that relationship. so you, from the very beginning of this conversation,

we've talked about your sort of upbringing and your rootedness in ireland. you seem to suggest to me that there's something particular about the family in ireland that may be different from some other societies, maybe even from neighbouring britain. you say, you know, "in ireland, it's partly about realising "you cannot leave your family. "it may be a particularly irish kind of truth." you say, "i speak to friends in london or new york "and i hear things like they're not going to go back "to christmas to their families, "and that would be impossible in my circle." we had a euphemism for family estrangement, and it was called emigration, right? because there was so much emigration, you never had to kind of say, "i've left because of the moral claustrophobia of the 19805"! because the society was kind of difficult to deal with, or that your family were in it this way or that way. you could go to america or australia or wherever you went, and you'd go home at christmas and you'd cry,

and that was it. so we didn't have the traditional kind of weight of breaking up families. mm—hm. um, and also returning to the home place is a very powerful... ..a very powerful journey for us, still. when it comes to your own sort of take on ireland today, what you don't do in your novels is write very explicitly, for example, about the changing role of the catholic church. no, i don't, i don't do that. well, why not? because... are you deliberately avoiding...? yeah, no, i do avoid the catholic church. so my mother said to me many years ago, she says, "if somebody worships a stone in the road "and you laugh at them, then they will pick "that stone up and hit you with it." she was very against blasphemy. we had large conversations about blasphemy. and i ended up kind of deciding that blasphemy was intellectually silly, but it seemed to me that to attack the catholic church in the �*805 and �*905 was like somebody kicking a bus, right? it was big and it was

a bit sort of...inert. it wasn't a conversation that i either could win or was interested in winning. if you kicked a bus, you wouldn't be able to move it. but, actually, in ireland, attitudes toward the catholic church have had an impact. the church has surely had to change? so i've had religious atmosphere in books. but, actually, in the wren, the wren i put in a good priest just for badness. they chuckle i just thought, "yeah, why not?" let me ask you... yeah, 0k. so you've broadly steered clear of the church as an institution... yeah, as an institution. i don't really deal with institutions. i deal with people and atmosphere, isuppose, yeah. absolutely. and one way in which you deal with people that, again, is really interesting to me because i think you do it with great nuance, is you write very directly about sex. i do. yeah. and, again, in this book, it goes into very difficult territory... it does. ..where the lines are sort of blurred between abusive behaviour,

consensual behaviour, women who have agency and then sort of use that agency to inflict pain on themselves in a way which the outside readerfinds very difficult to deal with. right. yeah. 0k. yeah. i mean, the thing about all my characters is they all have different kinds of sex. it's not all the same kind of monolithic or uniform sort of thing. the young character, nell, i was really taken and intrigued by a kind of move in modern female writing and in novels about... ..difficult material and about ideas of, uh, both being enthralled, being obsessed, being submissive and being masochistic. and i thought, this is... you know, french women used to write about it back in the day, and you'd kind of say... but irishwomen would never write about it... yeah, i think edna o'brien did write about some of it. yeah, yeah, i think she did. but what's interesting to me is that loads of young, talented irish writers, women writers, are now writing about this... yes, i mean, eimear mcbride — a girl is a half—formed thing is...you know,

a book about abuse, basically. but this is more a kind of turnaround of young, more confident women who are engaging in some kind of difficult or interesting conversation. and i don't know how much of that is socialised. i don't know how much of that is about online culture. i don't know what the politics are. so it's really an exploration for me because, you know, when my feminism came of age in the late �*70s, early �*80s, we thought that, you know, you throw off the shackles of repression and everybody�*s going to have a really good time. so why that didn't happen in the sexual culture of the western world is a very good problem. what happened? what was the souring there? why did the dynamic not blossom into something equal and liberating... no, cos what we see... ..in general? ..in this again, the wren, the wren has this character, nell, the young woman in the book who is unhappy in many ways through much of the book. and part of her unhappiness

is that she engages in this relationship with a young irish country boy, felim, who only wants her for sex. and she knows that and she feels abused and she feels humiliated, and yet she comes back for more. and i just wonder how some young women might interpret what you're saying about her and her choices she makes. yeah. so a character isn't everyone. you know, one character isn't a whole age group. i think people, there are differences in manners as people change and grow older. the question, i guess, is... am i being mean? am i being mean... how carefully...? ..to young women? no. yeah. well, how carefully you have to write... yes, you have to be very careful. ..these scenes, basically. yeah. you know, we live in a world where... ..we've had the metoo movement, we've lots of discussion about male abuse of women and about female agency. and you're kind of suggesting it's actually all really complicated and sometimes it isn't quite what it seems

in terms of who has the power and who wants what. so. . . nell�*s situation is not permanent either. so it's something that she moves through and learns about and from. so, um...it�*s like i'm making... it sounds like you think i'm making an argument, but i'm not — i'm making a story, which is a different thing. no. and it comes back to your determination not to be a capital p political writer, i guess. well, we all have things in our life where we turn around and say, "what was that about?" you know, so that's a very good question for a novelist. and also the turn, the turn is also interesting, how she leaves it behind. well, people will have to read the book to see how she does do that. yeah. because one of the key things about making a novel is that you have to put your character into a difficult situation. so it's the, you know, it's a narrative...device as well as everything else. we began with thoughts about ireland and i want to end with thoughts about ireland,

because it strikes me that, during the course of your now pretty long writing career — because you've been at it for, what, three or four decades? oh, i'm not counting. i'm not counting. well, three or four decades. i mean, ireland has changed a heck of a lot. yes. and today's ireland, if you just literally walk around the streets of dublin, for example, itjust looks very different. it's a much more diverse society, it's a much less catholic society. and ijust wonder whether it's really changed what you're interested in and what you want to write about next. is it changing your writing? it made me really glad that i stayed. that's one thing. so that, if you hung on in there, things would get better, and they really did. whether it's changed my writing or not, you know, the internet is in this book. it is. because i like to write in a contemporary way, and the internet is everywhere. so that's kind of interesting. but you go back to joyce and ulysses and say he puts everywhere into dublin just, you know, for that day of that book. so the questions are more cyclical than developmental, you know what i mean?

you come back to the same issues and problems, no matter what the society is like around you. and you still feel, as you continue to write and continue to set the stories in ireland, that you can get everything into ireland and ireland into everything? oh, wow, that's an interesting question. uh, yeah, yeah. well, i mean, the research is easy. it's on your doorstep. it's light on research and it's light on accents. and i love...| love irish voices. anne enright, we're going to end with your irish voice. thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thank you. thank you very much indeed. hello. thanks forjoining me. well, july, statistically,

is our warmest month of the summer, but thisjuly — at least, the beginning — is looking very different. mother nature has decided to put a pause on the summer heat. it's going to be rather on the cool side, even really windy at times in the north of the uk and, of course, there is some rain on the way. so, let's have a look at the forecast for monday. a couple of weather fronts spreading across the uk, and early in the morning, we will have had fairly cloudy weather with some rain splashing throughout towards the east that morning. sunshine and temperatures of around 13 or iii degrees celsius. ok, let's get the forecast then. that bright weather will give way to cloudier skies as that weather front advances eastwards. most of the rain will fall across northern england, parts of scotland, too, but out towards the west come the afternoon, the skies should brighten, so at least some sunny spells on the way. and in the south, too. temperatures — nothing spectacular. 17 in belfast, glasgow and newcastle, the midlands too, maybe nudging up

to about 2! in london — so, a little below where we normally are on average. wimbledon gets under way on monday. temperatures in london about 21, often cloudy, just about staying dry, and similar weather the following day. now, let's have a look at the forecast for tuesday. a weak ridge of high pressure tries to build across the uk, but around it, there's a fair amount of cloud. notice where the showers go — scotland, northern ireland and the north of england. i think if you're in the south and the southeast, the weather on tuesday should be generally dry and the temperatures about the same even — no higher than 15 degrees in the lowlands of scotland and just about 20 or so further south. then on wednesday, a weather front. low pressure again moving across the uk. you know what that means — cloud and some outbreaks of rain. really quite grey for a time for some of us. the winds not too strong but certainly a good breeze out there. temperatures may not even make 20 celsius midweek, which is a little unusual at this time of the year.

let's have a look at the week at a glance now. towards the end of the week, it's actually going to turn particularly windy, i think, across northern parts of the uk. guess what? even a risk of gale—force winds around some scottish coasts. that's it for me. bye—bye.

live from london. this is bbc news. french far—right national rally confirms its dominance on the first round of parliamentary elections. talks between the un and the taliban continue in doha, centering today on tackling the production of illegal drugs. scenes of wild celebrations as england and spain as both qualify for the euro quarter—finals. andy murray will announce whether he'll play singles at wimbledon as he prepares for his retirement. hello and

welcome to bbc news. i'm lukwesa burak.