Colin Barrett is at home in Dublin on the morning of September 16. When he speaks to Hot Press, he gets warmly congratulated on being the sole Irish writer to make the 2024 Booker Prize longlist. Though he ultimately doesn’t make the shortlist, it’s still an impressive showing.

In conversation, the 42-year-old writer is as relaxed, good-natured, and chatty an interviewee as you could ask for. When asked his honest opinion on award nominations, he strikes a decidedly candid tone.

“You hope the book gets reviewed and you hope it will get good reviews,” he says plainly. “But anything beyond that, it wouldn’t be something I’d think about much. With the Booker Prize longlisting, it really was a complete surprise. I wasn’t even sure if my publishers had submitted it, and I hadn’t asked them. And if they had and it hadn’t been longlisted, it would’ve been irrelevant.”

It begs the question then, what does a writer actually hope for when they send their novel out into the world? Again, Colin’s answer is candid. “I hoped that it would find its audience – people who would appreciate it.”

It feels like a remarkably small ask, especially for a debut novel that was such a long time in the making. Wild Houses arrived at the start of 2024, over a decade after Colin’s first short story collection – 2013’s Young Skins – saw him heralded as one of the most exciting and original voices in Irish literature. In the time from 2013 to now, fans and publishers have had to be patient, and Colin himself has no doubt had to deal with a certain weight of expectation.

But the writer simply says that Wild Houses took as long as it took. The idea, the premise, and the characters were with him shortly after Young Skins had been sent out into the world. But he says the novel had to “evolve” over the course of six-plus years (during which he would often put Wild Houses aside to distract himself by writing a second collection of short stories, 2022’s acclaimed Homesickness).

Those six years involved “me figuring out how to write a novel,” Colin stresses. “It was me figuring out how the characters fitted with the premise. The final shape and structure took a long time to figure out.”
All told, the work involved multiple edits and numerous drafts, with Colin adding that, “it felt like I had to write it one way to figure out that that’s not the way you write it. And then go back and do it again.”

During these years, alternating between Ireland and Canada, Colin kept at Wild Houses and never let it get away from him. He says that he “never really doubted or lost faith in the story or the characters”, although he admits that, “I did have doubts about my ability to execute it completely.”

Wild Houses was worth the wait, as it’s an extraordinary novel. As with many of the stories in Young Skins and Homesickness, the book focuses on people living on the edges of society, with the plot taking place over a weekend during the Ballina Salmon Festival. On a Friday night, one of the two main characters, Dev, is forced to play host when his small-time criminal cousins kidnap a teenager, Doll. They hole him up in Dev’s recently deceased mother’s home, and he is to be kept there until Doll’s brother pays back a drug debt.

Doll’s girlfriend, Nicky, serves as the other focal character, and we follow her as she navigates her relationship with her hometown, her wayward boyfriend, and her prospects for the future.

The story is slim, taut and contained – but incredibly compelling. It also works on many levels. While Wild Houses is an absurdist crime caper in the vein of a Guy Ritchie film, it’s also a pitch-black story about the callous criminal underworld. In addition, the characters’ penchant for cruelty and violence wouldn’t feel out of place in a Kevin Barry novel.

Beyond that, it’s a realist look at the angst, claustrophobia and thwarted hopes of people who feel trapped in their local environs. The two main characters don’t initially appear to have much in common, but they’re joined by the fact of living on the margins of their small town, in what Colin calls “the borderline between civil and uncivil society.”

“I am just very interested in writing about marginal characters,” he admits. “When I started writing about the temperaments and dispositions of people on the margins, that’s when I became a real writer. I found my subject matter.“

SHARP AND COMPELLING

It’s worth mentioning that Colin’s writing style is as sharp and compelling as the subject matter. Even as the fast pace allows it to zip along, Wild Houses teems with glorious similes and turns of phrases that stop you in your tracks. One character is described as having “a face like a vandalised church”, while the locals of a Ballina pub are noted for having “arms folded farmerishly across their chests”, leaning to “speak out of the sides of their mouths and provoke… voluminous spasms of sly laughter.”

Reviewers pointed out that Colin had an almost scientific understanding of how to write enjoyable prose on the sentence level. It’s the kind of writing that might make other authors feel jealous. But jealousy has never played a role in Colin’s relationship with his contemporaries; he is friends with many of the biggest names in the Irish literary world, and he’s always on hand to give a supportive cover quote to the book jacket of an emerging writer.

“I find writing to be an incredibly social activity,” he says. “A lot of my best friends now are writers I’ve met over the last couple of decades. I’ve always been interested in their work, and I’ve found it generative and inspiring to read my contemporaries while I write. Sometimes people think writing begins and ends with getting a book out, and it’s really not the case. You’ve got to write regularly and you’ve got to improve, and the best way to do that is to have a network of people around you who write and keep each other motivated.”

As a final question, does Colin have any words of wisdom for students who might be reading this hoping to become a Booker Prize-nominated writer one day?

“The main thing is, it takes time,” he says. “Trying to tell young people not to be in a rush is hard, because I wouldn’t have listened either, but the main advice about writing is that it does take time. I didn’t apply to the Creative Writing Masters until I was in my late twenties, and it wasn’t until a few years after that that Young Skins came out.

“What other advice? Read a lot. Read all the literary magazines and journals, that’s where you’ll encounter writing by people in and around your stage.

“So it’s about reading and taking your time. If I can speak about my own experience and the books I’ve published, I’d say that it feels like it all took a long time when it was happening. But looking back, it all happened at the pace it needed to.”

• Wild Houses is out now.