Author Colin Barrett grew up in County Mayo, Ireland. His stories have been published in the Stinging Fly, Granta, Harper's and the New Yorker. His first book, the short story collection Young Skins, won the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second collection, Homesickness, made the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year and was a Book of the Year in Oprah Daily and the Irish Times.
He's just published his debut novel, Wild Houses, to universal acclaim.
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Listen: Colin Barrett talks to Oliver Callan
We asked Colin for his choice cultural picks...
FILM
I do like going to the cinema, though to put things in perspective I’ve gone to the cinema about 5 times in the last 5 years. That said, 3 of those occasions were in the last six months. I now live near Dundrum, so my ritual with my buddy Paul, who lives nearby, is to load up on a couple of beers and an old fashioned in a pub across from the shopping centre, before heading into watch whatever the hell we’re watching. Last one was Flowers Of The Killer Moon. Before that, Oppenheimer. And it’s all just great, sitting there in the dark with an elevated blood alcohol level, watching all the stuff - the drama and incendiaries - going off in the dark, sliding down your eyeballs like a psychotropic sedative.
MUSIC
When I’m writing I like listening to drone, ambient, classical, anything that is long and hypnotic and repetitive and ideally without much discernible variation. Lately that’s been loads of Loscil and Tim Hecker.
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BOOK
Just finished Septology by Jon Fosse, which was the prose equivalent of the music mentioned above. It’s 600 pages, it’s technically one sentence. It’s about a moping, solitary Norwegian painter and his equally lonely, solitary double, the latter of whom is dying in a hospital from alcohol withdrawal. It’s extremely beautiful.
THEATRE
Don’t go to plays.
TV
The best TV experience I had in the last year or so was in Toronto, where I Iived until the summer of last year. My mother was visiting and jetlagged so we decide to watch one of these true crime pieces of crap that clog up the streaming services. I can’t really remember the particulars of it – it was some American lad who killed his wife and we realized it was the guy Ben Affleck based his performance on in Gone Girl – which unfortunately made the whole thing very darkly funny, because it seemed as if the actual lad, in the historical footage, was mimicking the very demeanor and affect that Affleck subsequently reproduced in the Fincher movie. And then my mother, who was on our couch and wearing her travel pillow the entire time for extra comfort, kept falling asleep because of the jetlag, then waking up and asking me to fill her in on what she had missed. Listen, those shows deface the sanctity of the human soul but it was a very fun bonding experience.
GIG
Don’t go to gigs, have absolutely no idea who any band is anymore.
ART
I recently read M John Harrison’s amazing novel The Sunken Land Will Rise Again – it’s a wonderfully macabre, poetic, subaqueous fever dream of England and the absolutely rotten psyche of its denizens. Anyway, a couple of very eerie paintings by the 20th century American painter Gertrude Abercrombie are described in it. I’m going to order some prints of them.
RADIO/PODCAST
SFUltra is a podcast by Sean McTiernan. This one is premised around him reading 100 sci fi novels – or novels that can be loosely affiliated with that genre, though he also regularly talks about; movies, radio plays, true crime, queer writing and art, the ant-human wierdness of the internet and YouTube in particular, among many other things. Sean’s a very good podcaster – he’s honest, deprecating, funny, very insightful, and his topic choices are brilliantly particular. He does not care about official cultural discourse or any of that crap.
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TECH
Dear god no.
THE NEXT BIG THING...
The Irish writer Rebecca Ivory has a first, brilliant, scathing book of short stories coming out in a few months, called Free Therapy.
A debut collection that shows us ourselves as we truly are.
— Jonathan Cape (@JonathanCape) December 13, 2023
Revealing the cover of Free Therapy by @RebeccaIvory93, unmissable stories already gathering incredible praise
Design by @lukejbird, published March 2024, available to pre-order nowhttps://t.co/OAoDbJ4o08 pic.twitter.com/woY2nzyULa
Wild Houses is published by Jonathan Cape and is available in stores and online now.
