Tell me about Rita, your new children’s animation series currently premiering on TG4.
Rita brings the first six picture-books in the Rita series from page to screen for a preschool audience. It’s a mix of animation based on Mr Ando’s original illustrations from the books and live action, presented by yours truly.
You have also written another animated series, Lí Ban.
Yes, the first series of Lí Ban will air next month. It’s a really fresh look at the myths and legends of the Celtic nations. It has fantastical heroes, legendary villains and a reality that bends around Celtic magic, all in an anime style. It’s been a lot of fun to make.
From Rita to Kneecap and Linda Ervine’s Turas project, Béal Feirste, the mouth of the Farset, seems to be refinding its Irish tongue.
I think what has been growing like mad in the community for a long time is suddenly bursting into people’s consciousness in these new ways. We used to be invisible but there is a new confidence now to shout it from the rooftops.
You were raised in an Irish-speaking home in Belfast. What was that like?
We felt very special. With one foot in the mainstream world and the other in this otherworld at home that was so rich in music and folklore, I think we had the best of both worlds.
It hardly held you back. You studied medieval history at Oxford then worked for a London ad agency. How did you get started as a writer?
I was a full-time mother living in Germany when the editor of Irish-language journal An tUltach asked if I would write a parenting column. She had been reading my Facebook posts about the chaos of daily life with small children. I got hooked on writing then. It was a little precious piece of head space for myself.
Ná Gabh ar Scoil! (Don’t Go To School!) has been translated into seven languages and was awarded the IBBY honour award in 2018. Tell us about it.
This picture-book was a game-changer for me. Its funny story of a little bear starting school whose mummy doesn’t want to let him go seemed to strike a chord with parents and children alike. I started doing events and school visits which helped turn writing into a real career. And its international success showed that writing in a minority language doesn’t have to be a barrier to global readership. That was a surprise.
Your book An Féileacán agus an Rí (The Butterfly and the King), an updating of the ancient Irish myth of Mídhir and Étaoin, was adapted for an Irish/contemporary dance show in 2020. How did it come about?
Dancer Clara Kerr approached me, looking for a story that could be told through dance. I told her the as-yet-unpublished story and from there, we brought together the words, the dance and the illustrations (by Shona Shirley MacDonald). It was pure magic to see how much emotion dance added to the tale.
[ An Féileacán agus an Rí – modernising and adapting an ancient mythOpens in new window ]
You were the inaugural Children’s Writing Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast’s Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
I was. From 2017-2019 I was tasked with an official mission to inspire children throughout Northern Ireland to read books and to write stories. It was the job description of my dreams.
Nóinín, your YA verse-novel, which tackles online grooming, won the Children’s Book of the Year Award in 2020.
Nóinín was a new departure for me, in audience (swapping picture-books for YA), in themes and also in genre as I had never written in free-verse before. I think writing in Irish helped me to tackle these new challenges – it is very motivating to create what doesn’t exist yet in the canon.
Which projects are you working on?
Lots of things, all at once. The tenth Rita picture book with illustrator Mr Ando is on its way. I have a book of fantasy stories coming out next year and am editing a new YA verse novel. I’m also in story development for future series of Lí Ban.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I was very lucky to visit the archive at the Seven Stories Centre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I got to see Judith Kerr’s original drawings for The Tiger Who Came To Tea, complete with Tippex corrections. I leafed through the original manuscript of Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and saw Philip Pullman’s notebooks full of scribbles about His Dark Materials. I can still feel the goosebumps.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
I’m a bit of a writing advice sceptic. Sometimes it just adds to the brambles of pressure we put on ourselves and feeds that sense of “not doing it right” that can be paralysing. That said, I love Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic as a madcap antidote to all that. She writes a lot about how no one can give you a permission slip to be a creator. Only you can figure out your own way.
Who do you admire the most?
I can honestly say that more than anyone in the public eye, I am bursting with admiration for my wild-swimming buddies who are the most badass coven I could ever hope to be a member of. They work hard, play hard and mother hard and still manage to sparkle.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I think I’d abolish Nerf guns. My children are a few years past the phase where we had to write our own Geneva Convention on the kitchen table to cope with the hostile invasions, but I’m still finding those obnoxious foam darts behind furniture and on top of cupboards.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
It has to be the Kneecap film. It has layers upon layers of irony, so you don’t know if you’re laughing at the characters or at yourself, or at finding unfunny things funny. Hearing our beautiful, real Belfast Irish on the big screen was powerful too. Scannán iontach, lán iontais.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
Oileán Thoraigh (Tory Island) off the north coast of Donegal. I stayed there first as a child in the 1980s and when I return as an adult it still vibrates with some sort of raw and ancient magic. Some combination of the dramatic cliffs and seabirds and the memory of being told terrifying stories about Balor of the Evil Eye makes it feel like another world.
Your most treasured possession?
A pair of glass earrings with dandelion seeds in them that I wore on my wedding day. We got married during lockdown in my parents’ garden, and those fluffy seed-wishes in my earrings meant more than anyone will ever know. That day was all my wishes come true.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
I have a copy of East of the Sun and West of the Moon illustrated by Kay Nielson that is stunningly beautiful. Some of my most precious books, though, are old mythology books I inherited from my dad. They have ornate spines and still smell like his study.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Children’s authors are my favourite people in the world. I’d invite Tove Jansson and Tomi Ungerer, Michael Ende, Astrid Lindgren, Shaun Tan, Quentin Blake and Ursula le Guin. And then to make sure we laughed until we cried, I’d invite Patricia Forde, the Children’s Laureate.
The best and worst things about where you live?
I live in Holywood, Co Down. A gorgeous wee town on the sea with the best charity shops and coffee shops in all the land. I feel disloyal thinking of a worst thing ... and you can’t make me.
What is your favourite quotation?
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. (Philip Pullman)
Who is your favourite fictional character?
I think it has to be one of Terry Pratchett’s witches, probably Granny Weatherwax.
A book to make me laugh?
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems. It’s hilarious. The pigeon pesters the reader to let him drive the bus, and the reader has to not crumble under the pressure. Read it with a preschooler and watch their giggles as they take on the adult role of saying “No!” whilst the pigeon tries all the child’s best pestering lines.
A book that might move me to tears?
Boys Don’t Cry by Fíona Scarlett is an emotional sucker-punch of a book. When I closed it on the last page, I couldn’t speak for quite a while. Set in working-class Dublin, it deals with drugs, illness and loss – but somehow leaves you with hope and perspective. Incredible writing – I would recommend this to anyone who likes to feel utterly floored by a work of fiction.
Rita is broadcast Mondays at 9.25am on Cúla4
