Lucy Caldwell is an accomplished and multi-awarded author, who has published extensively and has been acclaimed both nationally and internationally. Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981 and now lives in London. She is the author of four novels: Where They Were Missed (2006), The Meeting Point (2011), All the Beggars Riding (2013), and These Days (2022). She has written three collections of short stories: Multitudes (2009), Intimacies (2021), and her most recent, Openings (2024). She has edited the collected work Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (2019), and she has written plays, and radio plays.

Her numerous awards include the following: the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2021 she won the BBC National Short Story Award for her masterful story “All the People Were Mean and Bad”, included in her collection Intimacies, in 2022 she was the recipient of the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and in 2023 she won the prestigious Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, for her most recent novel These Days. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The present interview is the result of several conversations with writer Lucy Caldwell. The first took place on 30 May 2024 during the AEDEI Conference, hosted at the University of Alcalá (Spain), to which she was invited by the Alcalá Centre for Irish Studies “Alka-Éire”, and was sponsored by the EFACIS Irish itinerary through Culture Ireland and the Arts Council. The second has been undertaken through email exchanges.

Marisol Morales-Ladrón: Lucy, you are the daughter of a “mixed marriage” between a Catholic mother who speaks with an English accent and an Ulsterman father who enjoys traditional Irish music. How has the compromise between the two cultures influenced your writing? Do you feel that you are the inheritor of two traditions, or have you rather felt that both have blended together creating something enriching?

Lucy Caldwell: In many ways, that particular inheritance is both the place I write from, and the thing from which I can’t get away. My mother was born in Bristol, to an English Catholic family of Irish descent on her father’s side. My father was born in Belfast to a Church of Ireland-going family with Scottish origins. They met when he was studying in Bristol and my mother moved over to Belfast to be with him in 1975. What an act of love! They talked, then and at other points throughout my childhood, of emigrating; were at one point on the verge of moving to Canada, and on another occasion to the south of England, but work and family ties kept them in Belfast. They agreed that if they were to raise a family there, they wouldn’t have their children baptised into any religion and, in this sense, we were real outliers in Northern Ireland of the 1980s and 90s, not attending any church. I was aware of people making erroneous and often cruel assumptions about my mum, based on her accent. If the readers of this interview are interested, let me add that I wrote an uncharacteristically personal essay about it for Deirdre Madden and Paul Delaney’s book David Marcus: Editing Ireland (Stinging Fly, 2024), in which I go into this with much more depth. But in brief, this sense of being not quite one thing nor another, being other, being unaffiliated or somehow less than, plagued me through my childhood. It wasn’t until I encountered the writings of Louis MacNeice that I began to see a way of celebrating plurality and multiplicity, of being both/and rather than either/or; of holding and containing simultaneous contradictory things. It was through my own writing, then, that I began to negotiate and articulate and sometimes literally rewrite ways of being, and to become conscious of the many others who are and always have been negotiating complex questions of identity and belonging and multiple heritages.

MML: You are also married to an Englishman with German ancestry. How relevant is identity in your writing? What about your kids, who are growing up in England? Are they aware of their Irish heritage? How much of yourself goes into your books?

LC: My husband, like so many others, started actively pursuing his German heritage as a direct consequence of Brexit, an attempt to retain a European passport. Officially, that has stalled. His paternal grandmother fled Nazi Germany as a child refugee, and there is too much paperwork missing or lost. My children are lucky enough to have Irish passports as well as UK passports, and –unlike the dual-citizen children of my Swedish or Japanese friends– do not have to choose one passport and retract their claim to the other when they reach a certain age. It is very important to me that they have a sense of their Irishness, despite or maybe because of the fact that they’re growing up in Kent, supporting England in the football. Maybe the thing that I want most to preserve is their own sense of their capacity for Irishness, and their right to be and feel and identify as Irish to whatever extent they might one day choose. But their lives are their own to live. My entanglement in these questions, though, my absorption by them, on practical and existential levels, is everywhere through my writing, and also in the anthology that I edited for Faber, Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (2019). In my introduction to that I try to explore these big questions of who “gets” to be Irish, and what it means to be Irish, and for a nation to negotiate a history of diaspora and partition and, in recent years especially, immigration to a place whose sense of self has long been predicated on emigration.

MML: I’m very interested in the titles of your works. Your short story collections are named after single words, single concepts: Intimacies, Multitudes and Openings. Were you looking for a specific effect that would resonate throughout each collection or was it more that you wanted to play around with an idea from which others would emanate?

LC: When I named Multitudes, which is my debut collection about growing up, coming of age in, and leaving Belfast, I loved the joy of that word, the glorious rapturous, expansive, Whitman-esque feel of it; the way it celebrates plurality, both/and rather than either/or. As you can see, this is an article of faith for me! The stories I wrote after the publication of Multitudes seemed to be part of the same psychic project, and the collection as it came together seemed to me to be a sister-collection, and so I gave it a similar-feeling title, Intimacies. Multitudes was dedicated to my son, and the title story was about his birth, about becoming a mother, and so Intimacies I dedicated to my daughter and wrote a parallel title story, in a similar style. When it came to Openings, I toyed for a short while with calling it something markedly different, but the stories still felt part of that same (for want of a better phrase) psychic project. My novels, from the inside, feel very different from each other, written almost in opposition to each other. With each I have felt myself, sometimes consciously, turning in another direction, trying to do something new. But the stories belong together. I’m working on a fourth collection now, and my editor at Faber said he thought it was important for it to have a similar title to the others –they are the same body of work. I like the way, too, that a single-word title can be like striking a tuning fork. It gives a unity to the stories in that collection, even when they are contradicting each other, or coming at things from different angles. I am interested in the form of a collection, and the way it can be –I think it has to be– more than the sum of its parts, rather than a string of disparate stories corralled together, and a careful title helps with this. A title that suggests, intrigues, ripples through, opens up; it gives a feeling of unity to the stories without straitjacketing them.

MML: Also, the titles of your novels are inspired by quotes from poems or books. For instance, your BBC awarded short story “All the People Were Mean and Bad” draws from the picture book on Noah’s Ark that the protagonist reads to her daughter on the plane. Your first novel, Where They Were Missed, borrowed its title from Louis MacNeice’s poem “Selva Oscura”, which recalls the idea of hunting, a prevalent theme in your writing. Also, another stanza from the same poem appears as an epigraph in These Days, together with a quote from Sylvia Townsend Warner’s letters. Are these the literary references that have inspired your prose, or is it more that you want your texts to dialogue with others from the past?

LC: I named my first novel, which I wrote at university, for the MacNeice poem “Selva Oscura” that I typed out and pinned to the wall above my writing desk, whatever desk in whatever room I was writing in. I had just discovered MacNeice’s poetry and knew already that it was going to be such a touchstone for my writing and for my thinking, and I liked the sense that my work could be in conversation with his, even though he-the-man and I could never literally meet and talk. I love the parts of Katherine Mansfield’s journals where she longs to meet Chekhov. “Ach, Tchekhov!”, she writes in 1917, “why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one” (Mansfield 2002: 141). Ah, Katherine! Please can I be there too? I love too the lines from W. S. Graham’s poem, “The Constructed Space”, which I also first encountered around the same time: “Anyhow here we are and never / Before have we two faced each other who face / Each other now across this abstract scene / Stretching between us. This is a public place / Achieved against subjective odds…” (Graham 1958: 30), the ways that people can meet in literature, outside of space and time, that souls can touch. My second novel used MacNeice too (“Meeting Point”, The Meeting Point,) as did my third (All the Beggars Riding, from a line in “London Rain”) and then, you’re right, my fourth as well, which went back to “Selva Oscura”: “these days, though lost, will be all your days” (MacNeice 2007: 718).[1] Usually, the line which gives the title has also been an epigraph to each novel. I think that epigraphs, as well as posing a question or a provocation, strike a note or set a tone, let the reader start tuning in, feeling something from the start. My story collections haven’t used MacNeice. They’ve used Van Morrison lyrics, a poem by Frank O’Hara, lines from a Chekhov play, and I think the new collection will take one of my favourite lines from Hamlet. It is –yes, exactly as you say– the privilege of being in conversation with those writers, with those works.

MML: On a similar note, I found it quite curious that the cover of These Days used small caps in all editions. I wonder whether it was intentional to emphasize the historicity of the narrative, or whether it was just a marketing decision. Could you tell us something about it?

LC: As a writer, you have very little to do with the cover, beyond giving token approval. But funnily enough, you are absolutely right with your instinct here! I was shown several potential covers, and I chose, or at least indicated my strong preference for, the one with the lower-case font for exactly that reason. I wanted to emphasize the ways in which life goes on, even in war zones, even at times of conflict. That line in the Sylvia Townsend Warner letter that I used as an epigraph –you don’t get to press pause until the war is over, then pick up where you were before. I wanted the title to have an intimacy to it, to convey the opposite of bombast.

MML: Focusing now on your interest in the historical novel, you have explained elsewhere that you shared with Hilary Mantel a concern for digging into the past and the need for finding common ground. These Days is your first historical fiction. Do you intend to further explore this genre? How relevant is it for you to reconstruct the past?

LC: These Days is the first novel I’ve written that follows Walter Scott’s Waverley rule –of “sixty years hence”. But none of my contemporary-set work exists in an ahistorical vacuum. Even if the date isn’t specified, I know exactly when it’s taking place –I need to. We have lived, are living, through a technological revolution. I need to know how my characters are engaging with their phones, for instance. Are mobile phones a thing, have they gotten so small that they can’t get any smaller and the companies have started making them big again? Are they smart phones yet? How are we navigating the city. This is a big one for me, as I get my left and my right confused, and I am always getting lost. Do I rely on an A-Z map, or on the little blue dot on Google maps, or CityMapper? How has the way we communicate been impacted, and what dramatic potential is there in this? I have moments in stories that hinge on, for example, one grey tick, two grey ticks, the ticks turning blue, the dot dot dot that goes away before the message ever comes. I love the great Modernist project of representing consciousness, of how we think, of what it is to be here, now, of how to convey all of that in a way that’s new, and so I need to engage with these things. On a more political scale, you haven’t a hope of getting a Belfast-set story right if you don’t know exactly what year it’s taking place. The CAIN project (Conflict Archive on the Internet) hosted by the University of Ulster has been invaluable to me. That said, there were specific challenges to writing These Days that I loved.

There is a story in Openings, published afterwards but in fact written first, called “Daylight Raids” that was the precursor to These Days. It is set in the London Blitz and was written as a homage to so many of my favourite writers, Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, Graham Greene, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mollie Panter-Downes, Virginia Woolf, all great stylists who were also great writers of and through the Blitz. I enjoyed writing it so much that I wanted to do it again. I loved the deep research that it took to bring that particular time and place of Belfast in the 1940s to life, the license it gave me to talk to people, to gather and preserve memories and anecdotes that otherwise might have seemed incidental. Woman after woman I interviewed would start by saying something along the lines of: “Ach, I’ve nothing of use to tell you”, and then, you’d get them talking and discover these seams of gold. Combing the journals of Virginia Woolf, say, and other contemporaneous diaries like those of Doreen Bates to get the language right, “looking glass” rather than “mirror”, for instance. It’s a balancing act: too much, and you sound over the top, a pastiche. And getting the sensibilities of the characters right, challenging our assumptions or stereotypes of women then, whilst not imposing contemporary morals on them. I do think, though, that when writing a historical novel, you’re only ever writing the present. The film of Amadeus tells us as much about the 1980s as it does Mozart. These Days, for me, is an account of the Belfast Blitz, but it’s also, inevitably, a way to explore living through the time of great emergency and extremity and uncertainty that was Covid, and there’s also an extent to which it’s reflecting on what it was like to grow up in Belfast during the Troubles.

MML: These Days was inspired by several events. On the one hand, a kids book on the London Blitz that you used to read to your son every night and made you reflect on the lost lives that happened to be in a specific place and not another. On the other, your grandmother’s inability and unwillingness to remember the Blitz, which she survived, due to her dementia. Like some of the characters in your novel, she died with her memories. So, what triggered the writing of your novel, was it the interest in the randomness of luck or the need to pay due homage to those who died and had been forgotten?

LC: It was all of those things. I wrote my story “Daylight Raids” (published in Openings), which is set during the London Blitz, in the autumn of 2019, and almost immediately began researching the Belfast Blitz –thinking, at the time, that I might get another short story out of it. The wealth of research material grew, as did my surprise that the Belfast Blitz barely exists in fiction, and I began to think that the story could be a novel. By then, we were in the early months of 2020 and, as Covid swept through Europe, taking, first of all, our eldest and most vulnerable, it became more important than I had ever imagined trying to preserve the stories. One woman I spoke to was just shy of her 103^rd birthday. Another I spoke to once, and arranged to speak to again in more depth, died before I could. But most important of all, I think, was my new understanding of what it must have been like to live through the Belfast Blitz. In the UK media during the first Covid lockdown there was a lot of talk about “Blitz spirit”, “stiff upper lip”, “keep calm and carry on”, “good in a crisis”, that sort of thing. But I felt what it must have been like to live through the Blitz in an entirely new way, the terror and the provisionality of it, the not knowing if this would last for weeks, or months, or until there had been total obliteration of everything. The ways in which life grinds to a halt and yet also carries on. The Belfast Blitz of April-May 1941 overlaid with our first lockdown in the UK almost exactly, it was uncanny. It felt that I had, in mysterious ways, a window into the past that wouldn’t have opened under any other circumstances.

MML: Grieving seems to be at the core of These Days, both communal and individual as much as public and private. Apart from the obvious grief for the lost lives and for the destruction of the city, some characters, like Emma or her mother Florence grieve in silence, either for an “illicit” relationship or for a silenced past. Was this your main concern when writing the novel, to pay due homage to all kinds of losses?

LC: That was an important part of it, yes. My fellow Northern Irish poet Nick Laird lost his father to Covid during the pandemic, and wrote a searing poem about it, “Up Late”. There are some lines in that poem: “An elegy, I think, is words to bind a grief // in, a companionship of grief, a spell / to keep it safe and sound, to keep it // from escaping” (Laird 2021). I definitely felt something akin to that when I was writing These Days, asking the same questions of how to grieve publicly and privately, of what survives of us, of what and how we have to let go, of what a writer’s role might be. The elegy as a form, of course, gets its energy from containing, in a sense, simultaneous and oppositional forces; it’s mourning the loss of something or someone, and yet as it’s being read, or spoken, that person is summoned up, not lost at all in one sense, but immortalized. I felt that most urgently as I was writing the Betty Binks chapter of These Days. She’s a little servant girl who dies in the third big air raid, and one chapter, just two pages, is a sort of litany, listing the incidental, almost meaningless things that are gone with her. They are woven together from conversations I had, from my own family stories, tiny scraps of my own grandmother. And there they are, forever, or at least as long as books, or this book endures.

MML: At the end of These Days characters seem to have gone through a transformative experience, not only as a result of the warlike situation but of the human connection that has developed among unlike people. How important was the message of true bonding and resilience in the novel?

LC: It was everything because what else is there? Writing the novel during lockdown, it became the work of my days, my weeks, to plot a course through the horrors of the Blitz, not stinting on the cruelty, the meaninglessness of them, but showing how people survived: how, in even the most desperate of circumstances, life goes on. It would have been amoral, I think, for me to have written that novel, and certain scenes in it especially, only trying to shock, or to hurt, or to show how bad things were. What I most wanted to say was that no-one who lived through that time, or ours, remains unchanged. But you don’t get another chance to turn, say, fifteen, or twenty-one, or six; you don’t get another chance to have your first baby, or your first kiss. You make the most of what you have. What struck me most poignantly about the diaries I read, the memories of the people I spoke to, was the oddness of the delights the Blitz had unexpectedly brought. The acts of resilience, the fortitude. James Kelly, the Northern Political Editor of the Irish Independent, reports survivors saying after the devastating raid of 15-16^th April 1941: “My God. That’s Belfast finished”. But it wasn’t. Iris Rocks, of Broom Street in West Belfast, remembers everyone saying: “We’ll never get over this” (qtd. in Douds 2011). But they –we– did, and do, and will. There is great solace in that, not just to know that they did, but that we can, too.

MML: Going back to your short story collections, Intimacies is a wonderful rendition of stories about a variety of themes that mostly gravitate around motherhood. Especially powerful is the first one, “Like This”, which evokes such realist emotions that the reader feels the same anguish and anxiety as the protagonist. The following, especially “Mayday”, “Night Walking”, “The Children”, “All the People Were Mean and Bad” or “Devotions”, are memorable explorations of different sides to the mothering theme. Is motherhood a major concern in your writing?

LC: I always wanted to have children, and I was also terrified that motherhood would be the end of any sort of artistic life. I was haunted by the phrase of Cyril Connolly’s, that the pram in the hallway is the enemy of art. Things have changed a lot, even just in the decade since my son was born, but back then there was so little fiction about motherhood. There were certain writers –Margaret Drabble, Anne Enright, Helen Simpson– who were doing it when others weren’t, whose work was and has been so important to me, but there were so few of them; that came as a real shock. I happened to have dinner with Lennie Goodings, founding publisher of Virago, after a friend’s book launch when I was about six months pregnant. We were talking about a book called The Squire, by Enid Bagnold, one of the only novels I’d been able to find entirely about motherhood, and she said: “You’re just going to have to write your own stories”. And it was a great surprise and joy to me to discover that, for me, motherhood was the making of my art. The novels I wrote before somehow weren’t in my own voice, whatever that might mean or be, and suddenly, I was writing as me. It had to do with many things, with having a whole new swathe of material, with priorities shifting, and suddenly not caring any more, or at least caring less, what people thought or said about my writing. It had to do with time. In a practical sense, I had almost no time anymore, so what I did with my snatched creative hours had to matter. At moments I felt as if I was writing for my own survival. In an existential sense, you have a baby, and you are, overnight, a member of a different generation, you have an opportunity to look back on the way you were raised, the things you took for granted, and reassess them. There’s also, which is interesting for a writer, an urgency and a vulnerability to even the most quotidian of moments when you’re looking after a young child. Edna O’Brien says of Chekhov that he can make even the desultory dramatic, and this was my experience of motherhood –even the desultory could be very suddenly, very abruptly, dramatic, and I make narrative use of this a lot. I also had fun writing stories that made use of gothic, of horror, of thriller styles or tropes. “Devotions”, on the other hand, was my attempt to make something sacred out of the mundane. I would like to think of that story enduring. It’s barely a story, it’s almost a poem, really, but it does manage to catch something of what I wanted to say about parenthood and love. Funny, though, in my day to day work I don’t sit down and think I’m “writing motherhood” so much as using motherhood as a prism to look at many things. Intimacy, generational trauma, loss, taboos, time!

MML: In Openings the motherhood theme seems to leave space for the representation of women and sexuality and their concerns within relationships. However, it again starts and ends with two stories that delve around motherhood and trauma. Do you see an evolution in your writing in terms of redressing similar concerns and themes? What is the intention?

LC: I felt my way through that collection intuitively, it wasn’t done in a schematic way. I don’t think I ever choose to write a story “about” something, it’s more mysterious than that. One of the things I love about a collection is that it can return to the same areas of interest or concern again and again, from different angles, head-on or obliquely; the stories then speak to each other, overlap and augment and contradict and enrich each other. I was aware of recurring themes, tones, subjects, of course. But sometimes you can’t look at it too directly or you’ll get far too self-conscious. I always find it fascinating (and occasionally terrifying) at conferences like AEDEI when you listen to academics delineating certain themes or evolutions of thought in your work that seem so obvious as they spell them out, and yet weren’t at all to you, and perhaps couldn’t be, if you’re to write with any degree of freedom. But I do also believe that once published, the work is not yours anymore, or not entirely. Reading is an act of co-creation between writer and reader –those souls meeting again– and any reader or critic or academic brings to a text much of themselves, too, of their own preoccupations and concerns. That’s the beauty of it. My role is to question my faults, of course, but most importantly to follow my instincts. The rest of the work belongs to someone else.

MML: Multitudes has been described as a collection that dwells on vulnerability and the frailties of the human condition, but vulnerability and precarious lives run throughout all your works. I feel that though your characters seem to live ordinary lives, they are always tested against the weaknesses and strengths of the human condition. Would you agree with this? Where They were Missed, for instance, engages with the tragedy of the Troubles and the normalization of violence, and addresses different forms of vulnerability and suffering, while in All the Beggars Riding the healing power of the legacy of the conflict lies in the nursing of a dying mother, yet another vulnerable subject.

LC: I think there’s no such thing as an “ordinary life”. I think all lives are extraordinary, even just in the depth, the scope, of their particularities, their unspoken or inarticulable longings. One of the greatest privileges of being a writer, to me, is the connection that it allows you to have with other people, or the excuse for that connection. People tell you things that they might not have told another living soul, that they haven’t told their mother, their lover, their priest. You see, in a way you otherwise might not, the private battles being fought by so many in the secret chambers of their hearts. I’m interested in the ways that our vulnerabilities are our strengths, the things, maybe, that make us need each other. But even then, I’m less interested in frailty and failure as absolutes of the human condition than I am in the moments or the ways that we overcome such things. I think those tests come in unanticipated ways, on unexpected days. I wrote the opening section of “Intimacies” about one such test, a version of a test that happened to me, and which I failed. But most of all I’m interested –maybe increasingly– in moments of joy, or transcendence, of grace. I don’t think, as they teach you growing up, or at least as they taught me, that the body is sinful, that we are a spark of soul trapped in unreliable and decaying flesh. I think that the material (and of course that word comes from mater, Latin for mother, which is interesting) is just the densest part of our spirit. I think that “the human condition” is that we’re here in this curious space-time reality to understand things that can only be apprehended by living in time. I articulate something of that in my story “Devotions” or try to.

MML: The protagonists of your novels and short stories are usually women –and mothers– of different ages and walks of life, engaged in issues of gender and sexual identity. The majority are also suggestively unnamed. Are you trying to convey a message about the universality of women’s difficulties in a patriarchal society?

LC: None of the protagonists of Multitudes or Intimacies have names. At first, it was an instinctive thing. I was writing them so intensely, so intimately from the inside, that giving them a name felt jarring and distancing, especially the stories written in the second person. As the stories accumulated and the respective collections began to take shape, I decided not to give them names, even when it involved acrobatics to avoid doing so, because I wanted the sense that, although basic biographical details might change, whether someone has one brother or two sisters or is an only child, say, or has a son or a daughter or two children or none, they were facets of the same story. The image that came to me was of a cubist portrait, made of overlapping portraits, shapes, and I liked that. I’ve relaxed the rules with later stories. Some characters need names. And my protagonists always have names in novels. I think you almost always need to be able to name the person or people you’re spending so much time with, and to talk about them with others. But stories –that intense dart of intimacy– it’s a different thing. I don’t think there’s any message or even messages I’m trying to convey. I’m just trying to catch something of what it is to be here, now. I don’t think of my characters as being “engaged in issues” either; we all just are, whether or not we choose to be, and a female body happens to be a more politicized thing to inhabit than a male one these days. I’m interested in untold and undertold stories, and these tend to be those of women and, until relatively recently, with a few notable exceptions, of mothers.

MML: Openings, your collection of very fine short stories, was published last year by Faber and Faber. Where is your writing leading you next?

LC: For the moment, it’s more short stories. It took over a decade before I wrote a short story that was any good; for years, they just didn’t work. The short story is a mysterious, very demanding and very exposing form, but it’s one that rewards devotion. I feel I’m just starting to be able to do some of the things that I want to do with the form, just beginning to understand it.

MML: Thank you very much, Lucy, for this interview, for taking your time to reflect on your work and for sharing it with me and with all the potential readers. I wish you the best of success with your writing.

Acknowledgements

The research carried out for the writing of this article has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, through the projects: VOPAS: “Voices of the past: The contextual referent in Contemporary British and Irish historical fiction” PID 2022-140013NB-100; and INTRUTHS 2: “Articulations of Individual and Communal Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Irish Writing” PID2020-114776GB-I00.

Notes

[1] This poem is included in the collection Solstices (1961).