Sebastian Barry

My name is Sebastian Barry, I’m sometimes a novelist, I’m sometimes a poet, sometimes a play write and I’m sitting in an old rectors study in the deep heartland of Wicklow, the back country.  You have to come over a great mountain to get here and in the old days, years ago, it was so remote that you could virtually disappear from view for a few days and no one would know anything about you so this is a very satisfactory place for a writer.

The room itself has for me the qualities of a story.  When we first came 10 years ago, there was no floor here, there was barely any plaster on the walls, the ceiling was in doubt, there were no bookcases of course.

I love provisionality in a room because that’s how I grew up as a child.  I like something to be almost there, to be semi destroyed but now it’s in a completed state so the room is ready to be published you might say.

You come in here, the door clicks in a certain way.  There’s a kind of ratchety quality to it that I imagine the rector, 150 years of rectors relished as well.  Your brain falls, feels as if it falls much deeper.  You’re years and years ago or you’re never.  You’re in a place that was never, or you’re in a future and you’re so sunken in this world and you’re so concentrated.

You don’t need a room like this to work.  When I lived in Paris, when I was 22, I had this piece of plastic that folded down off the wall.  But you could concentrate there, and that is the whole thing, to have a room.

Virginia Woolf spoke not only for women but for men, to have a room of your own.  A little niche, a place where you can come and I think somehow, of all the places I have worked this has been the most valuable to me.

In some ways it embodies both the idea of a room as a piece of plastic folding down in a Parisian garret but also of my grandfather’s studio.  He was a very very poor but wonderful painter, watercolours.  On the bookshelves behind me I have the remnants of his oil colours which he only had as an old man because most of his career he simply couldn’t afford oil paints.

The desk itself, my wife Ali and I, when we were a bit younger, 25 years ago bought it in the old antiques market in Francis Street.  I’ve written everything on this now for 25 years which is a slightly frightening thought now that I think of it.

Also on it are the various little bits of stray storm objects from life itself.  There’s an old paperweight from a friend of mine who used to live in Cleveland, Ohio which is apparently the least beautiful city in the world.  Now after 30 years I’m writing about it in a new book so that paperweight will curiously help me.

It’s a sort of detritus; it is like after a tiny, tiny tsunami has washed across and these are what are left.  It’s a sort of jumble but I’m fearful to get rid of anything.

I’m in here, I would say, according to my wife Ali far, far too much.  Sometimes with a nostalgia for the days when I was coming in here, fiercely in the morning, passionately happy with a book on the go, a state of being I hope to embody soon.