"I write short, short stories while I am writing a novel": interview with Nuala Ní Chonchuir

Nuala NíChonchúir is an award-winning and talented poetry and fiction writer with a wide-ranging literary production. She has explored all literary genres and has addressed a great variety of themes, most of them connected with gender issues, male and female troubled relationships, sex, the body, the visual arts, the family and the mother-son/daughter bond, among others. Born in Dublin, in 1970, she holds a BA in Irish from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Translation Studies (Irish/English) from Dublin City University. She now lives in Co. Galway, where she writes full time and teaches creative writing courses. Nuala NíChonchúir has published one novel, "You" (2010). Her second, "The Closet of Savage Mementos", is due in spring 2014 and her third one, "Miss Emily", has just been accepted for publication by Penguin USA and Penguin Canada. NíChonchúir has also authored four short story collections, "The Wind Across the Grass" (2004), To "The World of Men", "Welcome" (2005), "Nude" (2009) and "Mother America" (2012), and has recently published a chapbook of flash fiction, entitled "Of Dublin and Other Fictions" (2013). Her poetic production includes the titles "Molly’s Daughter" (2003), "Tattoo: Tatú" (2007), "Portrait of the Artist With a Red Car" (2009) and "The Juno Charm" (2011). She has also cowritten a play, "Departures", with three other writers and she is now guest editor of the spring 2014 edition of "The Stinging Fly". NíChonchúir has been awarded several prizes, among which we could mention the Cúirt New Writing Prize, the RTÉ radios Francis MacManus Award in 2002, for her short story “The Wind Across the Grass”, and the 2013 Thresholds International Short Story Feature Writing Competition, for her essay “A Trio of Irish Short Stories”. Her third short story collection, "Nude", was shortlisted in 2010, followed by her fourth, Mother America, which was also long listed for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize in 2013. I had the pleasure to meet Nuala NíChonchúir in Cáceres last May 2013 during the celebration of the XIII Conference of AEDEI, to which she had been invited as a guest writer, sponsored by the Embassy of Ireland in Madrid. She read from her work and additionally gave an insightful plenary lecture entitled “Choosing YOU – the second-person voice in two Irish novels”. The following interview took place in the course of the conference and has been updated in the last months through personal meeting