A quarter of a century ago, sure he wanted to be a writer, Kevin Barry took himself to West Cork for a summer to write a novel. Subject? Hadn’t a clue. But he was surrounded by disused mines whose workers had left their homeland for the city of Butte, Montana over a century earlier when the Irish copper seams played out.
And this fact did seed an idea. “It just struck me that that’s a Western,” he tells me. “Butte Montana, late 1890s – and it’s a Western with Cork accents.
” A research trip to Butte followed in October 1999, allowing Barry to delve into the history of a city which even today has the highest number of Irish-Americans per capita in the country. “In the 1890s it was this little Sin City high in the Rocky Mountains, all these Irish copper miners getting their hands on good dollar wages and going suitably crazy on the benefits,” he explains. “I wrote around 100,000 words and it was terrible.
You know, I had no idea how to write a novel. I didn’t have the chops for it. And what I especially didn’t have at that time was characters – I didn’t know who the story was really about.
” Fast forward two decades and Barry is by now an established author with Edinburgh-based publishers Canongate. He has three short story collections behind him as well as three novels. One of these, 2019’s Night Boat To Tangier, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious awards.
A predecessor, 2011’s City Of Bohane, was longlis.