Molly Hennigan | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (Ghost) is a book that, in a swift, sensitive movement, has achieved something that many people speak about, think about and slowly edge closer towards after years of scholarship and research. Across various interviews and within the folds of the text itself, Ní Ghríofa relays how she comes to the story of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill on the periphery of other paths that are well-worn. In Ghost, charting a timeline between the 1700s and the present moment, Ní Ghríofa traces the life of the poet Ní Chonaill through a series of personal reckonings. Stretching the text over the edges of her own experiences of motherhood and tragedy, she fills the gaps in our knowledge of the poet by listening out for echoes of her life today. Ní Ghríofa is not researching from within academia,...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, November 2024 In September I spoke to Colin Barrett about his latest book, the novel Wild Houses (2024), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Colin is also the author of the short-story collections Young Skins (2013) and Homesickness (2022). A short story from Young Skins, ‘Calm with Horses’, was adapted by Nick Rowland into a film in 2019, starring Cosmo Jarvis, Niamh Algar and Barry Keoghan. Years ago, I was working in book distribution when a friend first recommended that I read Young Skins. I responded petulantly to the recommendation, thinking that smalltown Irish malaise was overdone, and that I’d already read enough fiction about it. In our conversation below, Colin touches on the sweeping naivety of youth – how being dismissive, and growing out of it, is a necessary part of being a writer and, in this instance, a reader. Thankfully, I...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, January 2024 ‘The fawn looked at me, batting four sets of lashes, giving disarming smile. Off he went, hustling around the bandstand, rattling the local blue tits to the core.’ Isabel Waidner’s latest novel, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023), spans prize culture, notions of social mobility, wormholes, daytime telly and, perhaps most memorably, an eight-legged Bambi. Waidner’s previously published work includes Gaudy Bauble (2017), Liberating the Canon (2018), We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019) and Sterling Karat Gold (2021), which won the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize. Corey Fah, like Waidner, is a writer who has won a literary prize – in Corey’s case, ‘The Award for the Fictionalization of Social Evils’. But Corey Fah struggles to collect the prize, which takes the form of a UFO that hovers just out of reach.  After failing to collect the prize, Corey Fah returns home to...

Brian Dillon | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 I was fifteen years old when it first appeared. I’d cycled to school as usual, survived a flummoxing maths lesson without shame, settled into the day’s second period and opened my science textbook, when I found I could not see straight. I blinked hard at the page; something remained in the way. I tried to get the object in focus, the better to banish it, but it would not resolve. The thing was not exactly there, no blurred patch or dark hole in space, instead pure absence, as if one side of reality had simply dropped away. I recall thinking that whatever this was, it would be hard to put into words. I looked up from the book and there the nothing was still, obscuring several classmates, half the blackboard and an array of chemistry equipment on the teacher’s desk. Surely I...