In conversation with... Colin Barrett

The Atlantic seaboard is a magnetic for the imagination. A place where thoughts and ideas crash on the weather worn shore and disperse in a spray of creative energy. It's something in the wildness of the place, the poetry of the Hiberno-English and the feeling of an almost righteous isolation. It's something that Colin Barrett knows well. Andrew Hamilton finds out more.
A lot happens in Glanbeigh. At the end of every lane in this West of Ireland town lies a life and a story worth knowing. They are tales shaped by love and loss, revenge and hope - stories that scratch at the surface of the conscience mind, somehow demanding to be written and read.

Glanbeigh is the creative home of Colin Barrett. The fictional Mayo town has formed the rich breeding ground for his breakthrough collection of short-stories 'Young Skins' and helped Barrett catapult himself to the head of an emerging breed of exciting new Irish writers.
"When I started writing about Glanbeigh and writing about that world and the characters who inhabit it, that work always seemed like my strongest work. It seems to have an intensity and a focus that my other work didn't have. Of course I was writing other stories [not set in small town Ireland] but not everything I write gets published. I tried different things, I experimented, but it just didn't have the same energy that those stories have. They just seemed more alive," he says.

To read the interview in full click HERE