Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (ga; born 22 February 1954), also known as Eilis Almquist and Elizabeth O'Hara, is an Irish novelist and short story writer who writes both in Irish and English.

• Literature is the history of the emotion. Fiction gets inside people’s heads; it does what is impossible: it reads minds and hearts. This also throws light on one of the things I want to do as a writer: I want to document life as it is now, as I have experienced it, as a source for the future. We – who are alive right now in this time and place – are the only ones who can provide a reasonably full picture of what it feels like to be alive here and now.

• Every journey is a voyage of self-discovery as well as discovery of other people and other places, and so provides perfect material for the writer or storyteller.

• Like most short story writers, my sensibility is not a million miles away from that of a lyrical poet. The abstract thought, the idea, or the nuanced emotion, finds its most profound and concise expression in description. That is the difference between artistic writing and journalism or scholarship.

• my sense of writing short stories is that it is like digging up a shapeless rock from the ground and chipping at it until it becomes a coherent statue.

• A little stone in a pond, rippling out, or a world in a grain of sand: that's the good short story.

• In my life there has been a constant conflict between the demands of everyday life and the demands of art.

• A woman who is a writer, perhaps any kind of artist but a writer in particular, has to be prepared to take risks, real, emotional, and intellectual. She has to be prepared to flout convention and go against the stream. The pressure on everyone, especially women, to conform to social norms - in the old days, to be a good housewife, these days, perhaps, to be a good career girl, to climb the corporate ladder, to be thin... and to be a good housewife - is very strong. You can't succumb to this pressure and write. But from the conflict of the conformist and the non-conformist, the tame and the wild, the inside and the outside, art can grow. The key is not to lose sight of the wild side, the chaotic side, the artistic side.

• I am interested in the detail of life: how people inter-relate, what they eat and drink, how they dance, what rituals they observe. Very likely I would be interested in all of that anyway but the study of ethnology heightened my awareness. It means, for instance, when people talk about life as "ordinary" it is meaningless as far as I am concerned. For an ethnologist, what people eat for their breakfasts is fascinating, and reveals a great deal about their history, culture, geography and much else.

• When people talk, as they do, frequently, about the necessity to "globalise" modern Irish literature, or to desist from navel gazing, they ignore the wisdom of these words. The best literature is local, and specific, and in that specificity - that historicity, if you like - the universal is expressed.

• Like all fiction writers, I write in particular about the emotional lives of human beings and about their inter-relationships. I am concerned to express the wholeness of such emotions and relationships above all, in all their complexity, and I believe that this is what fiction, more than any other form of writing, literary or scientific, can achieve. Possibly it is its most important function. How useful fiction is as a source for the emotional history of the human race can be questioned. Henry James pointed out that the relationships in life are endless, but in novels they are limited. However, if I am researching an historical period, in preparation for writing a piece of historical fiction, I turn to the novels of that period for an insight into how people really felt, and really lived, during it. To that rather than to the histories or documentaries. As a writer I am aware that I too am documenting the way people feel at this juncture in history and in this place.

• Another reason for writing in Irish is that Irish is a threatened language. One of the European minority languages which has survived better than many others, it does so in the face of constant opposition mainly from within Ireland, where many people have a rather weird hatred of the language. The rate of attrition for minority languages in the world is horrendous they disappear daily. One way of helping to save a language is by using it artistically, by writing in it. I want to do a tiny bit for the Irish language, the language my ancestors have spoken for generations. Writing plays and novels is one way of doing it.

• As a citizen, I often wonder what blind spot we have today. What abuse are we committing that the whole of society blindly condones? Cruelty to animals, as J. M. Coetzee might suggest? Environmental abuse? Road carnage? Indifference to the Third World?

book edited by Caitriona Moloney & Helen Thompson

• Irishness is so dualistic: the duality of the North and South, Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant. And that is characteristic of other postcolonial societies.

• ...what Irish people in general do to the Irish language-they let it die, although they would not take responsibility for killing it!

• everything in Ireland has opened up: people take risks; it's expansive, positive society, and that affects publishing as well.

• I always felt on a ridge, like “Kingston Ridge," in-between different societies, looking down at them. That's a painful place to be in a sense, but it also gives you a dual perspective.

• We're all the descendants of the ones who survived, who were probably involved and turned a blind eye to other people's suffering, probably colluding with all kinds of violence and maybe responsible for it.

• I know brutality to children wasn't exclusively Irish, thinking of English public schools. But, it is important, and I am more incensed retrospectively about the institutionalized violence to children which occurred in my childhood and was part of our society until recently. I think it's been hugely damaging to Irish people and is only now coming out into the open.

• Irish nationalism constitutes a backlash against everything that's British, but has produced a terribly rigidly Catholic, censorial, punitive society which evolved after independence and which most people now would have enormous problems with. We have a legacy of a rigid, illiberal, punishing society which kept women and children down and was frightened of every sexual impulse and of writing.

• Official website
• GoodReads page