Fin Keegan

Australian writer, Peter Carey remembers his younger self believing that Australian writers, “couldn’t be any good”. Now he has come to believe that such prejudices “show the level of self-hatred . . . colonialism brings on”.

I remember feeling something similar in Ireland. As a child, indeed, I thought one had to be English to be a proper writer. There was a sense of impoverishment attached to those few Irish writers (Patricia Lynch; Sinéad de Valera) I was aware of. Ironically, my favourite author was himself Irish but the extensive biography at the back of my Narnian books revealed that he had been born in “British” Ireland, boarded in England, and was now (or had become) a thoroughly Oxbridgean figure, as English as warm beer and cricket bats. C.S. Lewis’ journey, and the books borne out of it, proved my prejudice incontrovertibly: books belonged to the English.

There were other literatures I was aware of, of course, chiefly Francophone (the Tintin and Astérix comic-books; Dumas; The Little Prince), but these were all piped to us through London: not only was England the origin of stories, it was the arbiter of stories from elsewhere.

It was quite something therefore to discover, in my late teens, that Ireland was so teeming with writers that the “Irish Writer” had become almost a stereotypical figure.

Carey quote comes from Writers and Company, CBC Radio, Dec 14th, 2003