you know me. will want all the cool. off center. court fast moving. and successful beyond belief. hollywood this is the way we do it. nollywood starts august 7th on d w. if you don't talk often about things that really matter to people often just go quiet about it just because that's what a book that deals with that becomes a way of breaking

a silence. i don't care if. we met the irish writer colum told being while he was in berlin the world renowned author is extremely versatile she writes novels short stories essays place and poetry we spoke with him about his books in his life as well as about ireland and how it's changing. tobin is particularly known for his skill at writing compelling female characters. his bestselling novel brooklyn was adapted for the screen it tells the story of ellis a young woman who cannot find work in ireland and so makes the difficult decision to emigrate. like so many before and. after her illness bored to shit in the hope

of finding a better future. she heads to new jersey. there she settles in the borough of brooklyn which is home to a large community of irish immigrants. at 1st and she's torn between the 2 cultures and then between to meet tony in new york. and jim who she meets in ireland on a trip back. compassionate depiction of her heartache for torment and her agonizing decision consolidated his reputation as a writer of women. where does his understanding of women come from. a woman i would say maybe could you just stop that making those exaggerated figures

of women you know there are gay versions of it was i think of a very powerful i was brought up by women and other words that they were my mother had sisters were in the house a lot i had to nurse siblings of a girl so were always well women talk and i was always very interesting what they were saying where's the man could sit i'm a very grumpy your 3 man talk about some sport i was not if you're a 5 year old is nothing there's nothing in it for you in this or that women no matter what they say it would be yours for us and. for me. to be has written 2 books much of his work is autobiographical and ireland plays a major role. each artist in the great ira's tradition has invented and that's what you said in an interview what is your island i come from a few streets. in

a small town in the southeast called us quarter that's my world. and a small stretch of the wexford coast about 10 miles away so i'm not sure the world is home but it's certainly a territory and out of that territory got a great deal of emotional resonance so because i know the streets and i know that stretch of coast so that's mine in this place with long winters long memories and a lot of grey sky and there i can work from there. to being isn't the only one to have been inspired by the skies of violent this country in 5000000 has given birth to a disproportionately high number of writers james joyce is arguably the most famous . but the playwright george bernard shaw. oscar wilde. samuel beckett's. as well as the poet seamus heaney. beckett and he were awarded the nobel prize for literature why.

that's an impressive place in what looks to its size the only way out of poverty was education and the only way into education was literacy so literacy became a sort of fetish almost in poor families books reading and writing and in the long winter he said you know one person in the family has to start thinking i could write one of those i could do that. many of ireland's great writers were born in the capital of dublin. the city has a number of museums devoted to the country's literary heritage. one is the writers museum which celebrates centuries of irish literature. what about the new generation of writers in ireland. up there at the moment it's every season. 2 or 3 young writers or virus are very very

good there's been happening especially the last take 5 years and you go surely not another you read the book you think this is very good at the moment it's an extraordinary thing and you thought maybe it won't happen again people become injured in software or you know go to work for facebook or something but now they're writing novels and stories. and write is one example there's also called mccann. and. then there's sally rooney who's novel normal people was a runaway success all over the world a 1000000 when you know you're reading it because it's fascinating to see you know the ones who are more experimental and the ones who are writing for women's lives and the ones who write about the city of the country yeah it's an absolute fascinating thing you know you want to be a fool not to readers and what literary tradition do you see yourself. oh i'm sort

of melancholy you know i come out of something that's melancholy. so but the thing is when you're writing when you're working if you start thinking over what literary tradition come out of you with then write a terrible sentence which would be filled with self-importance of sounds and me and my literature titian so you job is not to think like that to get the sentences to the work and to make the sentences true meaning that if one sentences like this as a rhythm like this the next sentence has to be a variation on that rhythmically and you work almost as though you're a composer working and. therefore the less you think. the better and better job is to sort of deal truthfully and find the melody for that is it like music but well it's like music in that it's based on melody it's based on rhythm and that hits the nervous system sometimes or it should hit the

reader's nervous system before the reader starts to interpret her use or intelligence some other system is happening that causes the reader to turn the page not merely to know what's happening next but to actually follow the rhythm. tobin is passionate about music. kill us chamber music especially baroque he divides his time between ireland the united states and spain but he says home is where his records are do you listen to music while you have right now i know i know i think that would be a mistake it would bring in the eat a lot of music has easy a motion that's very satisfying but when you're working you need something much more austere such a silence and also i think you need to face in words you're having a big view out the window would distract you just look in or it's all in word and it's all silent no music no fear just no comfortable just just

right you know just work along. wonderful books of emerged from the self-imposed austerity the blackwater lightship tells of 3 generations of women discussing homosexuality hiv aids and changes an irish society. the pastor is a fictional account of the life of the us writer henry james. mothers and sons is a collection of short stories in which each story explores an aspect of the mother son relationship. nora webster's unforgettable protagonist struggles with grief and finds her way to emancipation in 1906 i. house of means is a retelling of a classic greek tragedy. tobin's that shows his compassion and intelligence yes he wasn't always an avid reader he struggled at school as

a boy when he was 12 his father died in toby began to start or. you could start reading at the age of 9 and you started writing poems it's the age of 12. i was the death of your father's a trick up to right or something ha i imagine so because it came very soon afterwards but it was also that in my family study was very important and that when you went to secondary school you should going to ruin your own every evening and you know you might be reading the last month or learning science and i was writing poems you know and so just being left alone in a room like that with paper was the 1st thing i did instead of studying. what luck for the literary world the extracts from mothers and sons which to be reads to us tells of unexplained absence a recurring motif in his words. the time we were left by our mother you know.

has no drama attached to it was all grayness strangeness aren't dealt with us in her own distracted way her husband was mild distant almost good humored and all i know is that our mother did not get in touch with us once not once during this time there were no letter was no letter or phone call or visit our father was in hospital we did not know how long we were going to be left there in the years that followed our mother never explained her absence and we never asked her if she ever wondered how we were or how we felt during those months. what you describe in this book and ignore but so that's what you experienced yourself when your father was dying a muslim left you is alone with relatives i mean how did that influence you you know you know life you know writing. all that was more or less what happened it

doesn't mean it's autobiography because you change things and the way you remember changes things anyway so it's not a sort of slice of memory as much as a sort of literary form that uses memory events things that happened as a way of sort of thickening the plot or or anchoring everything in what you might call fact or at least in things that i remember as a hobby that i think are true i think that had enormous influence. you learn to look after yourself and you get the notion that nothing is ever certain or secure i suppose you learn not to trust people. i'm not sure any of this is useful to being a writer but it certainly has helped me in some books to have a subject that i had not fully worked. you know psychoanalysis or any other way that it was like i'm not that needs to be untied and so it became

a pressing matter to write this down and to find a form for him to find a way off communicating it without sounding self pitying or sentimental. to be is a citizen. but he remains drawn to the landscapes of his child to the. and to the atmosphere in the country for so many centuries by the rigid codes of the catholic church. conservative catholic nationalist of their words if it was your family background today what you're present is just the opposite what happened ireland changed everyone in every family slowly change themselves i mean it wasn't you know if it began perhaps with the women's movement but i mean women who weren't part of the women's movement just

slowly in their own houses became more powerful became you know became more powerful or became less interested in being being made feel small and out of that group other movements about how to treat children about gay people or people for example who didn't feel racial or religious feeling so their society became slowly sometimes imperceptibly and then quickly. very liberal place to live and in easy place to live. for a long time the catholic church did have a strong influence in ireland around 80 percent of the irish population is catholic . a series of sex abuse scandals has tarnished the church's reputation but the priests and nuns to be diplomats are likable. in the last 2 decades couple of few scandals and the catholic church also india and

all over the world but became public but including the irish county where you are from what oldest burglarize you're looking back to you see your own experience in a different light i do because i was in a boarding school where a good number of the priests ended up in jail and so i think if you're a novelist but if you're anybody but just said knowledge and you're looking up high i think i know when that happened and how it happened but at the time mr. i didn't realize what was going on right in front of me and i think for a novelist it's a tremendously interesting idea that all the time perhaps in all of our lives in our characters lives there's something going on that's maybe obvious except that they don't notice. in a landmark referendum of 2015 a majority of irish citizens voted in favor of recognizing same sex marriage call into being openly gay played an important role in the campaign and is proud.