Trespasses has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and has received rave reviews from The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others. Kennedy read excerpts from her novel, Trespasses, at the Connolly House on Friday.
“I drew very heavily on my family’s story, or my own childhood,” Kennedy said. “That’s how a lot of assassinations were carried out,” she says.According to author Louise Kennedy, the experiences she had as a child living through the Troubles inspired her most recent novel, fostering the creation of a narrative that touches on family and a divided country. It took being followed home twice by two men in leathers on a motorbike for him to have had enough. You’re a Catholic.’”Īlthough the area where her family lived was quieter, her father struggled with “ingrained bigotry” as the only Catholic in a 150-strong Protestant workforce.
And my mother went: ‘You’re not a bloody Protestant. “I remember being asked what religion I was and saying I was Protestant and everybody laughed. “Some of that came from a birthday party I went to,” says Kennedy. “There were very often riots and petrol bombs being hurled.”Īt one point, Cushla is the only Catholic at a children’s party. She remembers rubber bullets being fired as she ducked to the floor of the car on her way to see her grandmother, who lived near Ardoyne, in north Belfast. Its two main characters – Cushla, a twenty-something Catholic teacher and sometime barmaid in her brother’s pub, and Michael, a married, Protestant barrister – were made up, but Kennedy based much of the backdrop on her childhood. Trespasses was also inspired by her upbringing as a Catholic in Holywood, a small, mainly Protestant town, on the shores of Belfast Lough. “My hot place for writing – a term the poet Martina Evans uses for a time or a location or some sort of event in a writer’s life where all of the work springs from – is the time I spent in the north in the 70s,” she says. Yet it has, helped by getting shortlisted, twice, for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and a nine-way auction for The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, which is steeped in Irish history. So I didn’t think that would ever happen.”
“It wasn’t that I thought: ‘Ooh, I’ve found a new career and I can stop being a chef.’ It’s really hard to write and get paid for it. Not that she expected writing to lead to a pot of gold. In January 2014, I felt I’d thrown everything I had at it and nothing was ever going to work. It was incredibly shit, trying to run a business that you know is failing. Her fervour for anything other than the struggling restaurant she ran with her husband was also a factor.
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