Barrister Conor on home turf with new novel

Lifestyle – Conor Bowman is a man of many parts. The graduate of UCG and Cambridge University is a legal eagle, champion debater, singer and novelist. As he prepares to read from his latest book at Clifden Arts Festival, he tells JUDY MURPHY how this moving, humorous story, set in his home town of Galway is his most personal work of fiction yet.

Galway City man Conor Bowman who has a successful career as a Senior Counsel and writes novels in his spare time, doesn’t do social media or mobile phones. He does have email and if he wants to arrange to meet you, that’s how it’s done.

This approach of not clogging up his life with the minutiae of Instagrammers or Tweeters is working well for Conor who’ll be at Clifden Arts Festival on Monday, September 23, reading from his latest novel, Hughie Mitman’s Fear of Lawnmowers. Published by Hachette Ireland this beautifully written book charts young Hughie’s adventures as he is dealt a series of life-changing events.

Sometimes sad and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, it’s Conor’s sixth novel and could be described as a love letter to his native city.

The second in a two-book deal with Hachette, it follows his critically lauded Horace Winter Says Goodbye (2017).

Conor’s initial plan for his second book with Hachette had been to set it in Portugal with a rock star as its central character. But that didn’t chime with the publisher’s plans.

“They told me ‘we’re trying to build a brand in Ireland’ and that I was unusual in being a guy who writes books women like,” the barrister, who operates out of Dublin’s Law Library, explains.

So, Conor opted for Plan B.

For years, the UCG graduate had wanted to set a novel Galway – in fact, he completed a Young Adult novel ‘as Gaeilge’ about two decades ago, which won an award at the 2003 Oireachtas – but it has never been published.

Conor, the former Chair of UCG’s Lit and Deb Society and a champion debater, isn’t short of opinions about the state of Irish-language literature. The reason he decided to write his first book in Irish was partly due to what he felt was the snobbery attached to the language during his time at UCG. He studied it in first year and felt the attitude in some quarters wasn’t inclusive.

His aim, as a young rebel, was to write a modern Irish-language novel that would have broad appeal. Priest and novelist Pádraic Standún, whom he befriended in the 1980s, while studying Irish at Áras Uí Cadhain in Carraroe, supported him all the way.

“He said ‘if I can write books, you can write books’,” Conor recalls.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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