The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Novels set during the Troubles have done well in recent years. Whether it’s the Booker Prize winning Milkman by Anna Burns or Michael Hughes’ re-interpretation of the Iliad with Country, writers have found new ways to deal with a hugely traumatic time in British and...
David, your novel follows a British battalion on its tour of Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Why did you want to write about this difficult period in British and Irish history? To some extent the Troubles are a forgotten ‘war’ and quite unlike almost any...
By the 1980s the conflict in Northern Ireland had become something of a stalemate, to the extent that, according to the government of the day, an ‘Acceptable Level of Violence’ had been achieved. In today’s risk averse world this statement seems horrifying but back...
