Sit Back and Listen
Martin Doyle, A Hosting: Interviews with Irish Writers 1991-2026
Lilliput Press, 354pp, €22.95, ISBN 9781843519751
reviewed by Tadhg Hoey
‘The shortest way to Tara,’ James Joyce famously wrote over a century ago in A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, ‘is via Holyhead.’ Tara, of course, refers to the Hill of Tara, once the seat of Celtic Ireland’s High Kings, and Holyhead is the Welsh town that, for centuries, would have been the first port of call for those leaving Ireland. As a standalone sentence, the cryptic, vaguely contradictory directions are meaningless, but as a metaphor about needing to leave Ireland in order to make art that gets to the heart of Irish culture — uttered by Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s self-mythologising stand-in as he planned his self-imposed exile — the sentence would, in a very profound way, go on to shape how many Irish artists thought about the relationship between their art and their country. But is there any truth to it?
On the one hand, many of Ireland’s leading modern writers did, in fact, leave. Some, like George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Elizabeth Bowen went to London, and were then followed by successive waves of Irish writers, from Edna O’Brien to Pat McCabe, and from Eimear McBride to Enda Walsh — all of whom found a home away from home. Others, like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who settled among the avant-garde in cosmopolitan, continental Western Europe, inspired countless aspiring young Irish writers who have gone in search of it themselves, whether in Paris or Prague, Berlin or Barcelona. Others still, like Brian Moore, Colm Toibin and Colum McCann spent considerable parts of their professional careers in the United States, often teaching creative writing or English literature.
In A Hosting: Interviews with Irish Writers 1991-2026, the Irish Times’s Books Editor Martin Doyle pieces together a more complex story of Irish writers’ relationship with their homeland. Coming in at over 350 pages, and featuring interviews with 60 Irish authors (including several of those listed above) spanning three and a half decades, the collection puts to rest any single narrative of what an Irish writer’s path to publication looks like. For every writer who grew up and left, many more stayed. In fact, several — Mike McCormack, Paul Howard, and Eugene McCabe, all featured in here — were born abroad in cities like London and Glasgow to Irish parents before they ever saw Ireland. There are many ways, Doyle’s book suggests, that a writer may find their way to Tara.
A Hosting is a collection of the features Doyle has written over the past 35 years for newspapers such as the Irish Post and the Irish Times. In his short introduction, Doyle describes it as a ‘career retrospective.’ It was not intended, he qualified, to be canonical, though he felt it ‘fairly represents the best of contemporary Irish writing.’ Its omissions, I would venture a guess, might be more to do with the book’s length than anything else. Readers already familiar with Doyle’s writings at the Post or the Times will know he has no shortage of pieces to choose from.
While the writers featured in here skew heavily towards novelists, there are playwrights, poets, and writers of nonfiction scattered throughout. And while, again, it is not a mirror image of Irish literature, never mind Irish society — the collection does tilt in favour of more established writers — A Hosting is a kind of state-of-the-nation look at how the writers on an island still bearing the scar of an increasingly irrelevant partition understand themselves, their art, and their relation to their ever-evolving shared homeland. The interviews, which range from around three to ten pages (the pieces tend to trend longer over time) manage to be both general enough to appeal to a wide range of readers, and sharp and probing enough to satisfy even those already familiar with Doyle’s subjects.
Doyle comes across as an affable interviewer with a knack for getting up close and personal, quietly and effectively disarming his subjects. One of the most intimate profiles featured here is of Anne Enright, whom Doyle interviewed in 2025. When their conversation turns to the lonely, stressful years Enright spent as a student in the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme in the mid-1980s, she tells him that her relationship with her conservative, religious parents — felt Enright was ‘living in sin’ with her boyfriend — was then at its worst. Debates around abortion, contraception, sexuality, and morality were raging back home in Ireland, and it was not yet unheard of for pregnant unmarried women to be disowned, or sent to the Magdalene laundries. The experience of being torn between two visions of her life — one, an honest and untrodden path, true to herself, the other, a life-denying lie to appease her parents — was beginning, she tells Doyle, to take its toll on her mentally.
When the conversation skirts her suicide attempt during this period — which Enright had quietly revealed two decades earlier at the end of her 2006 work of nonfiction, Making Babies — Doyle senses its gravity, and wraps up. Enright follows up the following day over email to express her surprise, and gratitude, at having being asked about suicide, a subject in her writing which she felt had been overlooked. It is the most arresting moment in the piece, and certainly a standout in the collection. In terms of material for an interview, it is about as raw as any journalist could hope to get from their subject. Furthermore, the tact to broach that subject, plus the ability to respectfully report and write about it, is not something every journalist possesses. In Doyle’s hands, it turns into a bracing moment, where the usual reported interview breaks down and it becomes clear that we’re witnessing a moment of real vulnerability from Enright, where typical dry-witted humour and understatement is dispatched in favour of sobering admission.
Doyle describes his approach to interviewing here by acknowledging that while interviews — much like fiction — require friction, equally important is the ability to recognise the moments in which he should sit back into his chair and simply listen. There is, in general, not much friction in A Hosting. (The only notable moment that comes to mind is when Doyle pushes back against John Banville’s claim that the blame for the enormous number of Palestinian killed since October 2023 rests squarely on Hamas. Banville changes the subject to tell an amusing anecdote and the conversation rolls on.) If you are a writer, Doyle is perhaps an ideal interviewer to take an interest in your work — he’s friendly, and he takes the work seriously. Doyle’s own observations about his subjects occur throughout but this is very much the work of a serious journalist determined to convey their subject through their subject’s own words, not the work of a critic seeking to make a point. And while there’s much on offer here, Doyle’s interviews with Sally Rooney, Kevin Barry, Dermot Healy, Wendy Erskine, Roy Foster, and Diarmuid Ferriter are particularly compelling. I was also delighted to discover two writers I had not heard of, Eoin McNamee and Eugene McCabe, whose names and works are invoked many times by other interviewees as important influences.
One of the most commendable things about A Hosting is to see a thriving literary culture in conversation with itself. References recur throughout, highlighting a shared, continuously-evolving culture and the degree to which each generation of Irish writers has been inspired and sustained — at least partially — by the one preceding it. Although it features only interviews with some of the most established Irish authors of the past 35 years, it still manages to chart an Ireland transformed. In it, one can catch glimpses not only of the ways in which Ireland has changed — the decline of the Catholic Church’s influence, the Celtic Tiger, the Belfast Agreement, the 2008 Recession, Ireland’s literary revival, as well as it gradually becoming a country which now sees positive net migration — but also into the ways in which Ireland, and Irish literature, continues to evolve. The seismic changes reflected in A Hosting were enough to prompt this reviewer to wonder what Irish writing, and its relation to a sense of Irishness, might look like in the decades to come.
On the one hand, many of Ireland’s leading modern writers did, in fact, leave. Some, like George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Elizabeth Bowen went to London, and were then followed by successive waves of Irish writers, from Edna O’Brien to Pat McCabe, and from Eimear McBride to Enda Walsh — all of whom found a home away from home. Others, like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who settled among the avant-garde in cosmopolitan, continental Western Europe, inspired countless aspiring young Irish writers who have gone in search of it themselves, whether in Paris or Prague, Berlin or Barcelona. Others still, like Brian Moore, Colm Toibin and Colum McCann spent considerable parts of their professional careers in the United States, often teaching creative writing or English literature.
In A Hosting: Interviews with Irish Writers 1991-2026, the Irish Times’s Books Editor Martin Doyle pieces together a more complex story of Irish writers’ relationship with their homeland. Coming in at over 350 pages, and featuring interviews with 60 Irish authors (including several of those listed above) spanning three and a half decades, the collection puts to rest any single narrative of what an Irish writer’s path to publication looks like. For every writer who grew up and left, many more stayed. In fact, several — Mike McCormack, Paul Howard, and Eugene McCabe, all featured in here — were born abroad in cities like London and Glasgow to Irish parents before they ever saw Ireland. There are many ways, Doyle’s book suggests, that a writer may find their way to Tara.
A Hosting is a collection of the features Doyle has written over the past 35 years for newspapers such as the Irish Post and the Irish Times. In his short introduction, Doyle describes it as a ‘career retrospective.’ It was not intended, he qualified, to be canonical, though he felt it ‘fairly represents the best of contemporary Irish writing.’ Its omissions, I would venture a guess, might be more to do with the book’s length than anything else. Readers already familiar with Doyle’s writings at the Post or the Times will know he has no shortage of pieces to choose from.
While the writers featured in here skew heavily towards novelists, there are playwrights, poets, and writers of nonfiction scattered throughout. And while, again, it is not a mirror image of Irish literature, never mind Irish society — the collection does tilt in favour of more established writers — A Hosting is a kind of state-of-the-nation look at how the writers on an island still bearing the scar of an increasingly irrelevant partition understand themselves, their art, and their relation to their ever-evolving shared homeland. The interviews, which range from around three to ten pages (the pieces tend to trend longer over time) manage to be both general enough to appeal to a wide range of readers, and sharp and probing enough to satisfy even those already familiar with Doyle’s subjects.
Doyle comes across as an affable interviewer with a knack for getting up close and personal, quietly and effectively disarming his subjects. One of the most intimate profiles featured here is of Anne Enright, whom Doyle interviewed in 2025. When their conversation turns to the lonely, stressful years Enright spent as a student in the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme in the mid-1980s, she tells him that her relationship with her conservative, religious parents — felt Enright was ‘living in sin’ with her boyfriend — was then at its worst. Debates around abortion, contraception, sexuality, and morality were raging back home in Ireland, and it was not yet unheard of for pregnant unmarried women to be disowned, or sent to the Magdalene laundries. The experience of being torn between two visions of her life — one, an honest and untrodden path, true to herself, the other, a life-denying lie to appease her parents — was beginning, she tells Doyle, to take its toll on her mentally.
When the conversation skirts her suicide attempt during this period — which Enright had quietly revealed two decades earlier at the end of her 2006 work of nonfiction, Making Babies — Doyle senses its gravity, and wraps up. Enright follows up the following day over email to express her surprise, and gratitude, at having being asked about suicide, a subject in her writing which she felt had been overlooked. It is the most arresting moment in the piece, and certainly a standout in the collection. In terms of material for an interview, it is about as raw as any journalist could hope to get from their subject. Furthermore, the tact to broach that subject, plus the ability to respectfully report and write about it, is not something every journalist possesses. In Doyle’s hands, it turns into a bracing moment, where the usual reported interview breaks down and it becomes clear that we’re witnessing a moment of real vulnerability from Enright, where typical dry-witted humour and understatement is dispatched in favour of sobering admission.
Doyle describes his approach to interviewing here by acknowledging that while interviews — much like fiction — require friction, equally important is the ability to recognise the moments in which he should sit back into his chair and simply listen. There is, in general, not much friction in A Hosting. (The only notable moment that comes to mind is when Doyle pushes back against John Banville’s claim that the blame for the enormous number of Palestinian killed since October 2023 rests squarely on Hamas. Banville changes the subject to tell an amusing anecdote and the conversation rolls on.) If you are a writer, Doyle is perhaps an ideal interviewer to take an interest in your work — he’s friendly, and he takes the work seriously. Doyle’s own observations about his subjects occur throughout but this is very much the work of a serious journalist determined to convey their subject through their subject’s own words, not the work of a critic seeking to make a point. And while there’s much on offer here, Doyle’s interviews with Sally Rooney, Kevin Barry, Dermot Healy, Wendy Erskine, Roy Foster, and Diarmuid Ferriter are particularly compelling. I was also delighted to discover two writers I had not heard of, Eoin McNamee and Eugene McCabe, whose names and works are invoked many times by other interviewees as important influences.
One of the most commendable things about A Hosting is to see a thriving literary culture in conversation with itself. References recur throughout, highlighting a shared, continuously-evolving culture and the degree to which each generation of Irish writers has been inspired and sustained — at least partially — by the one preceding it. Although it features only interviews with some of the most established Irish authors of the past 35 years, it still manages to chart an Ireland transformed. In it, one can catch glimpses not only of the ways in which Ireland has changed — the decline of the Catholic Church’s influence, the Celtic Tiger, the Belfast Agreement, the 2008 Recession, Ireland’s literary revival, as well as it gradually becoming a country which now sees positive net migration — but also into the ways in which Ireland, and Irish literature, continues to evolve. The seismic changes reflected in A Hosting were enough to prompt this reviewer to wonder what Irish writing, and its relation to a sense of Irishness, might look like in the decades to come.