An Interview with Alan Duff

John Banville, 2018

The monograph, "John Banville," offers a close analysis of most of Banville’s major novels, as well as the ‘Quirke’ crime novels he has written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black and his dramatic adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. From the beginning, Banville’s work has been marked both by the presence of a complex, embedded discourse about the significance of art and by a concurrent self-conscious obsession with its own status as art. His novels perpetually reveal an overt fascination with the visual arts in particular, and with the aesthetic principle of literature as art. This study argues that, as a whole, Banville’s work presents an elaborate and richly-textured coded account of his relationship with art and with the self-referential fictional world that his novels have conjured. It is from this critical context that John Banville’s central argument is derived. This book asserts that Banville’s fiction can be viewed both as an extended interrogation into the meaning and status of art as well as itself being a representative of the type of art that is admired in the pages of the novels. As such, it also represents an extremely sophisticated enactment of the novel form that goes beyond the “self-reflexivity” of late twentieth-century fiction to chart new developments in the literary arts. The book’s critical process involves several specific reference points. Firstly, Banville’s own theoretical statements about art in interviews, essays, reviews and journalistic writing over the past 40 years are synthesized into a coherent interpretation of the author’s artistic vision which is thereafter used as a conceptual touchstone when considering his major works of fiction. This is done in conjunction with investigating specific theoretical perspectives about the relationship between literature and art by critics such as Denis Donoghue and Susan Sontag, and by philosophers of art, Graham Gordon, Etienne Gilson, Peter Lamarque, and Susanne Langer.

Overland 182

Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Novelists in the New Millenium is a collection of interviews with eight writers among the most significant in contemporary fiction in English: Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, David Lodge, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Arundhati Roy, Graham Swift and Will Self. While discussing their most celebrated works and throwing a backward glance in their career, the authors give insight into their writing processes and delineate their main concerns, themes, narratives techniques and literary strategies. Among the recurrent issues addressed here are the representation of history, the blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality, the figure of the narrator and the status of the writer in the new century. The collection will enable readers to gauge the similarities and differences in the way writers deal with a wide range of subjects, help them perceive converging preoccupations, but also be aware of the specificities of each author and of the remarkable diversity of contemporary literature in English.

Estudios Irlandeses, 2014

In this interview, Roddy Doyle, one of the most popular contemporary writers in Ireland, provides insightful comments on crucial aspects of his writing career. Doyle speaks about the beginning of his literary adventure, the creative process of his work, and his artistic influences, as well as his feeling of pride in being a native Dubliner. Furthermore, he addresses his experience of the Celtic Tiger era in Ireland and the multicultural reality of the country in the late 1990s. Doyle’s detailed discussion of the female characters in his work is one of the most intriguing parts of the interview. He also gives hints about his latest novel The Guts (2013) and talks about the shift in theme, to the middle-age crisis in men, in his recent work: The Bullfighting (2011), Two Pints (2012), and The Guts (2013). His ideas about the filmic adaptations of his work, his favourite writers and his favourite fictional female characters are other inspiring points of the interview. The interview closes with Doyle’s characterization of the Post-Celtic Tiger period in Ireland and his views about the shifting portraits of Irish men and women.

Études irlandaises, 2018

around 40, who have just written their first or second novels. I was interested in questioning them about Irish culture and heritage, the books that influenced their writing, those they are reading, but also their own work, the use they make of their artistic licence, and the way they perceive their recent status as men and women of letters. This paper reports the informal conversation we had together. To know more about each of them, let us start with a short biography of the writer and a brief synopsis of the listed novel.

International Literary Quartery Interlitq, 2021

The published text of an interview conducted with David Garyan of the Interlitq

This is the pre-print version of the introduction to Daniel Lea, Twenty-First Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016)

2010

2004

Many of your readers, particularly those readers who are students of creative writing, are interested in the writing process; the content, the context in which you write, the way you plan. I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit about that. How do you get your ideas in the first place? A I suppose all my ideas have come from experience, but then you have the problem of deciding how to write them down. The writing process has been different thus far with the writing of each novel. With my first novel Under a Thin Moon, I wrote it out initially as four separate stories since I like dealing with not just one central character in a novel but a cast of characters. I suppose this has something fundamentally to do with the way I see society, people living isolated, alienated lives but within that, subject to the same forces and experiences. I had experience of growing up on a council estate where, by the end of the time I lived there, we were entirely surrounded by heroin addicts, ex-cons, some of them very nice of course, but this gave me a powerful sense of what environment can do which I wanted to communicate. I started writing that book before I went to Leeds University. I was twenty-four years old when I started writing that novel and thirty when I finished it. I was massively interrupted by doing my degree and again by finding out about earlier working-class writers. So, to some extent, I did shape my material around the sense that working-class writers have a literary tradition. They were always thought to be writing straight from life, you know, what I had for breakfast in the morning, whether it was raining when I went to work and all the rest of it. But once you have studied you discover that certain figures and certain motifs recur. For instance, political protest, the woman on her own with a baby, drunkenness, the deteriorating effects on a relationship of poverty. I did not know why this could not be considered a literary tradition in the way that the Renaissance is a literary tradition where there is always a murder, there is revenge and betrayal. But again it is labels. We were talking earlier about labels and people always see this writing as realist literature; i.e. literature that has not undergone any

Ontario Review, 2014