The award-winning author on his move from short stories to novels, writing marginal characters in small-town Mayo and the Irish fiction he rates most

Born in Canada in 1982, Colin Barrett was raised near Ballina, County Mayo, and though he left as a teenager, studying creative writing at University College Dublin, Mayo has provided the setting for almost all his writing to date. His debut short story collection, Young Skins, came out in 2013, winning the Guardian first book award and yielding a film adaptation, Calm With Horses, starring Cosmo Jarvis and Barry Keoghan. He followed it with the 2022 collection Homesickness and last year’s Booker-longlisted novel Wild Houses, which revolves around a poorly-planned kidnapping in Ballina. Winner of the Nero debut fiction award, it is now out in paperback. Barrett lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.

What sparked Wild Houses?
The first scene I wrote was the opening one. Dev Hendrick wakes up in the middle of night and there’s a car outside. Two men bring a teenage boy to the door. The men turn out to be Dev’s criminal cousins and Doll, the boy, is a bargaining chip in a haphazard blackmailing scheme. What attracted me was writing from the perspective of Dev, who is on the periphery. I was very taken with that situation, where a passive and withdrawn character is pushed right up against this dramatic and potentially traumatic event.

In some of the photographs you have to squint hard to see it – sandwiched between tree trunks or cloaked in fog. In others, it’s so close up that all you see are rivets or the cross-hatching of metal beams. In his series Thirty-Six Views of the Golden Gate Bridge (the title nods to Katsushika Hokusai’s famous woodcut prints of Mount Fuji), US photographer Arthur Drooker set out to defamiliarise the great Californian landmark, asking: “Is it possible to see the most photographed bridge in the world anew?” After two years on the project, he came away with “deep admiration” for its builders who defied predictions that the mile-wide strait could never be bridged. “What I found most resonant,” says Drooker, “even more than the span’s status as an engineering and architectural icon, is its power as a symbol of possibility.”

• Thirty-Six Views of the Golden Gate Bridge is available from arthurdrooker.com