Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.

Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.

I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.

Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.

I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.