When your award-winning debut novel is adapted into a Bafta-nominated TV series expectations run high for what might come next. But Louise Kennedy, the author of Trespasses, seems unfazed with the daunting notion of what is often called second book syndrome. Maybe it's her late entrance to the literary world, working in busy kitchens as a chef for decades or dealing with a cancer diagnosis that helps Kennedy cope with pressure.
She says she "could very easily never have written a word" and continued her career as a chef. "I'm sure my life wouldn't have been thoroughly miserable," she adds with a half smile. But in 2014, aged 47, a friend asked her to join a writing group.
"I had never written in my life. I had no ambition to write. It never entered my head." At first it was short stories, then came Trespasses in 2022.
Set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland it was a story of cross-community forbidden love between a young Catholic teacher and a married Protestant barrister. Kennedy's second novel is Stations, currently being serialised on BBC Radio 4, the reader meets Róisín and Red, following their friendship from rural Ireland to London, full of teenage angst, fragile friendships and the romance of escape. "I knew that there were going to be readers for Stations, but I could only write the book that I wanted to write," she tells BBC News.
Their story starts in County Kildare in 1982 and follows them for the next 25 years as Róisín follows Red to London. Kennedy describes her relationship with Róisín, as "unfinished business" as the lead character is the same unsympathetic teenager from her 2021 collections of short stories The End of the World is a Cul-de-sac. Kennedy goes to great pains to declare that Róisín isn't her and she's not Róisín, "but there are similarities".
Kennedy and her family left Northern Ireland when she was 12 in the 1970s and relocated to the Republic of Ireland where she found herself an outsider in a small, rural village. "I was a very unpopular, awkward teenager but I'm a good mimic. I thought that all my problems in my new school would be solved if I spoke like everybody else.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
