Donal spins a Booker nomination

EVERY day Donal Ryan would go to his day job in Shannon, before coming home in the evening to work on one of the best Irish novels in recent years.

 

On finishing The Spinning Heart he was knocked back by dozens of publishers but after he finally got a break from Lilliput Press, the novel went on to win rave reviews. On Tuesday, he was on the long list for the Man Booker Prize.

The Tipperary native knew he had some chance of a nomination but he really wasn’t expecting to be on the list of 13.  “I knew there was an outside chance but I really thought it was a very outside chance.”

On Wednesday morning he was still buzzing after his inclusion and said winning a Booker has been a vague ambition for the last 20 years. “I said on RTÉ this morning that in 1993 when Roddy Doyle won the Booker for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, that kind of became my ambition. With the hubris of youth, you’re convinced you can do it. But all through my teens, 20s and early 30s even, I was starting novels and losing confidence and putting them aside, just writing scraps here and there. I’d have loads of confidence for a few weeks and for a few more weeks totally lose it.”

Fragile confidence may have held him back, but his wife provided the push needed.  “Anne Marie said to me, and I was about 31 or 32 at the time, ‘you have to just do it, go do it now, stick with it and don’t stop writing until you’ve finished the first draft of the novel’.”

In fact he would write two novels. While The Spinning Heart was the first one published, he wrote The Thing About December before it. It will be on the shelves in the autumn. After his wife’s intervention he was a different animal and he applied himself properly.  “Getting the first draft of the two novels done, I was very disciplined with myself. It was nine o’clock until midnight every night and on the weekends it could go to three or four in the morning.

“You can get so absorbed in it, you can lose yourself totally at times. I don’t think a day went by for at least a year-and-a-half that I didn’t write every day.”

The Spinning Heart deals with the fallout from the financial collapse and it’s impact on a small town in the Mid-West. It’s told through 21 different voices, each character’s story building on the previous one.
While it’s a thoroughly gripping novel, it almost didn’t come into being, having been rejected by publisher after publisher. With the benefit of hindsight, Donal thinks he took the wrong approach.
“To say that I had 47 rejections is very disheartening for young writers and people who are trying to get published but it was really my own fault. I wasn’t circumspect about it at all. I literally went out scattergun and sent out manuscripts and emails everywhere, even to places where if I thought about it for a minute, I’d have realised they’d have no interest, high up or low down.”

Luckily for him, and many readers, it was finally taken from what is known in publishing circles as a ‘slush pile’.
“It’s a horrible phrase, slush pile, but they do exist. I’ve seen them with my own eyes now, there are literally rooms in publishing houses that are filled to the ceiling with manuscripts. It’s an impossible task, they wouldn’t have the resources to go through every one. There are probably brilliant novels lying in rooms.”

It must be a strange thing for one of your colleagues to emerge overnight as a great author. Donal said his co-workers have been very supportive and have a laugh with him about it.
“I have to say that my boss and my colleagues are just great, they’re so supportive. Last year when the launch was on they were brilliant. There’s be a bit of craic and banter in the office about it.”

While The Spinning Heart is about the fallout from the crash, The Thing About December goes back to the previous decade and what happens when a young man becomes a paper millionaire after inheriting valuable land.

There is a third book in the offing too and with the success of The Spinning Heart he may be able to take some time off the day job to write it.  “If I even got six months off in the next year I’d say I’d get the third one finished because I’m halfway through a first draft of the third book. I’ve had to put it aside for the last few months because things have been kind of hectic. The kids are five and three so they consume any bit of spare time you have.”