Gort’s Lisa lost for words

Gort author Lisa McInerney is in no danger of getting a swelled head after winning the UK’s most prestigious fiction award for woman authors for her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies.

A week after she won the £30,000 Bailey’s prize, beating five other authors including fellow Irish novelist, the Man Booker winner Anne Enright, she’s still bemused.

“I still haven’t got my head around it. Even looking at the long list, I’m thinking there were some amazing writers on it, so how did this happen?” says the author of this pacey, blackly comic novel set in Cork.

But, as she points out, “a lot of writers are probably their own biggest critics anyway” and that’s definitely true in her case.

McInerney, who was born in Gort in 1981, has been writing since she can remember and has, somewhere in her possession, a ‘book’ she wrote at the age of seven or eight.

“It was maybe six pages long, in a copybook,” she says adding that she used to read a lot and “a child’s imagination sees no barrier. If they can read stories, they don’t see why they can’t write them as well”.

That’s what she did, all through school and college – “all rubbish” – but helping to hone her skills.

“It’s a compulsion, something you can’t help but do,” she says of writing, adding that even when it comes to trying to make sense of events in her own life, she puts pen to paper.

“I see the world through text and prose and words. Other people might see it through maths or in pictures.”

Lisa’s world was an interesting one from the get-go. Born to 19-year-old single mother in Gort in 1981, she was adopted by her grandparents after birth.

People wonder if that was traumatic, she says, but it wasn’t one bit. At the time, children born to single parents were regarded by the State as illegitimate, a situation that wasn’t amended until 1987.

“From their point of view, they were worried it might affect my status in future,” she explains.

Lisa always knew the story of her birth and adoption and was fine with it.

“Kids are very adaptable if you tell them when they are young, as opposed to telling them when they are older. That’s when people have a harder time, when their views are set.”

Her mother subsequently met and married another man and Lisa has a half-sister. They all have a very good relationship, she says.

She loves Gort and still lives there, but when she finished her Leaving Cert at the age of 16 and was offered a place in UCC, she leaped at it.

“In South County Galway, I have a huge family I was very much the youngest and nobody ever listened to me,” she says with a laugh. So Cork, which she knew through her cousins in Carragaline, offered a chance to forge her own identity.

“I went down there at 17, the kind of age when you are learning who you are. Me and Cork got very intertwined at that stage. Even though Galway is home, I was always very happy in Cork.”

That kind of mixed emotion about the home place is very strong in Ireland, she says, adding that her husband, “who is from Cork feels very happy in Galway”.