“I’m dealing with a pretty bad case of impostor syndrome at the moment. I mean, I’m thrilled out of my mind, of course, but I just can’t quite believe it yet.”
Author Michael Crummey has just found out he’s this year’s winner of the Dublin Literary Award. Sponsored by Dublin City Council, the prize is unique in that nominations are submitted by librarians and readers from a network of libraries around the world. It also offers a uniquely large prize pot: the winner receives €100,000.
Having been longlisted four times (in 2003, for River Thieves, in 2007, for The Wreckage, in 2016, for Sweetland, and in 2021, for The Innocents), and shortlisted once before (in 2011, for Galore), Crummey says he “made a point of not spending that money in my head when I was shortlisted”. Also, he was up against fierce competition this year – the shortlist included the Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song, by Irish author Paul Lynch, and the Booker-shortlisted and National Book Award-winning James, by Percival Everett.
Now that he can start counting his chickens, Crummey says he’d like to “give a little chunk of money to both of our daughters, which I’ve never had the ability to do before. And my wife and I have some things around our house that we would like to get done.”
The 59-year-old speaks via video call from said house in his native Newfoundland, where the winning novel, The Adversary, is set. In fact, all of Crummey’s six novels so far are set on the east-Canadian island.
“When I started out, I really felt the desire to try to get this place on paper,” he says. “Newfoundland was largely an oral culture right up until my parents’ generation ... There were a handful of Newfoundland writers in the generation before us, but they were outliers – they were so rare that there was no such thing as a literature of Newfoundland.”
But another reason he’s compelled to write about the place is that it’s simply “the most interesting place I’ve ever been”.
“Because it’s an island, and has been isolated for so long, it’s a place and people unto itself. The people here had to rely on themselves in so many ways: for survival, first of all, and also just to make a life for themselves, to entertain themselves, to build a world.”
We speak about the Irish influence on the island, which he says is “palpable in just about every community”.
[ Newfoundland communities are ‘most Irish’ outside Ireland, genetic study findsOpens in new window ]
“There’s what they call the Irish loop on the Avalon [Peninsula], and those communities are almost 100 per cent Irish. The mayor of Waterford was over here a number of years ago, and he said when he was on the southern shore of Avalon, he felt like he was in Waterford – just hearing people speak, and their names, everything. There’s a non-broken line of descent from those original Irish settlers.”
The early 19th century, a period during which many of these settlers were arriving to work as labourers, is the setting for The Adversary. A Cain and Abel-inspired fable, the book tells of a feuding brother and sister in the harbour town of Mockbeggar, a place whose harsh climate and corrupt power systems make life a fight for survival. The sister, Widow Caine, wears men’s clothing, and will resort to any means to secure the kind of power and agency enjoyed by her brutish brother Abe, who is also fixated upon his own sense of importance and superiority.
Though it can be read as a stand-alone, Crummey says he wrote The Adversary as a companion piece to his previous novel, The Innocents, which told of a brother and sister orphaned and left alone in a small cove not far from Mockbeggar.
“I’ve always thought that the engine of that book was their love in the circumstance that they find themselves in. But because the book was called The Innocents, I kept thinking about Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, and I started to wonder, could I do what he did where he took Songs of Innocence and flipped it on its head? I think he said he was writing those sequences to show the two contrary natures of the human soul. So really, The Adversary was a deliberate attempt to write the worst of who we are as human beings.”
You just have to look at people like Trump and Putin and Netanyahu – the list is endless. I think they are who they appear to be … In most cases, they get worse
— Michael Crummey
The present age, in which “the worst of who we are as human beings is on the ascendance, particularly in the political realm” was part of what gave rise to the story, Crummey says.
“It feels like a pretty dark time. I don’t know if I would have written a book like The Adversary 20 years ago ... It feels to me like the world is embracing ideas and people who feel like violence and cruelty and disdain for people who have less is to be celebrated.”
While writing, Crummey deliberately avoided a redemption arc for his central characters. And while Caine and Abe are adversaries, this is not a hero/anti-hero set-up. Rather, both central characters are anti-heroes. Narratively, this presented a challenge: how do you write characters who don’t change? Crummey’s approach was to turn the focus to the characters around the Widow and her brother.
“It’s about what happens when you find yourself in the orbit of a black hole, and how everyone, in the end, gets pulled into that abyss.”
He likens the scenario to Trump’s relationship with the United States.
“When he was elected the first time, endless numbers of commentators said, ‘We don’t have to worry too much because there will be adults in the room, and they will curb the worst of his impulses.’ And, of course, they all left or got fired or else decided [to] get on the train and become enablers. And that’s what happens in this novel. People either decide to get on the train, or they’re pushed aside, or destroyed.”
The current political climate has made Crummey “more misanthropic” than he used to be, he says.
I have always said that ignorance has been my best friend in this whole process - not knowing how bad I was at the start, not knowing how long it was all going to take
— Michael Crummey
“I’ve lost the ability to believe that redemption, or a personal change, can come over anybody. You just have to look at people like Trump and Putin and Netanyahu – the list is endless. I think they are who they appear to be ... In most cases, they get worse, as well.”
Misanthropic may be the word he uses to describe himself but across the screen Crummey seems a gentle and open type, with endless passion for his work.
Writing, he says, “felt like a vocation from the beginning, but a ridiculous vocation. It felt a bit like saying, well, I want to collect bottle caps for a living.”
Growing up, he followed his mother’s influence and became “the reader in the family”, but it wasn’t until he went to university to study English that writing became a serious pursuit. Poetry came first, then prose. Through his 20s, he worked “crappy jobs” to support his vocation, publishing in journals and honing his craft, before releasing his debut collection of poetry, Arguments with Gravity, when he was 30. His debut short story collection, Flesh and Blood, came soon after.
“I think if someone had told me when I started out that it would be 13 or 14 years before I published my first book, I might have given it up or not started. But I have always said that ignorance has been my best friend in this whole process, you know, not knowing how bad I was at the start, not knowing how long it was all going to take.”
[ Paul Durcan: ‘Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others’Opens in new window ]
Crummey’s early work saw much success, including several award nominations and wins, but it wasn’t until his third novel, Galore, that he began to feel he knew what he was doing as a writer.
“I don’t know any writers who don’t struggle with a sense of impostor syndrome,” he says. “[Being a writer] feels like it’s something you keep having to prove to yourself. But I think [Galore] was the first time I wrote a book where I felt that’s the book I was meant to write, and everything I had done up to that point felt it was leading me to a place where I was capable of writing that book.”
The only problem with such an achievement, of course, was how to follow it.
“For a long time, I did feel like that novel was a roadblock. I’d written the book I wanted to write, so what do you do after that? But luckily, I have carried on, partly because I’m no good at anything else.”
Of late, Crummey has been working on a poetry collection and some film scripts, though he also says he’s “starting to sneak back into that novel space in my head”.
We joke that having won the award, all of that will go out the window.
“Now that I have some laurels to rest on, maybe I should just rest on my laurels,” he laughs. “But I quit my day job about 25 years ago, and that felt like a fairly reckless thing to do. It always felt temporary. But I’m starting to think – I’m almost at retirement age – and I am starting to think I might make it through and as a writer. There’s no certificate to put on your wall [to say you’ve qualified], but maybe that’s the real sense of accomplishment and blessing – to think: no, this is it, this is my life, and I’ll be able to do it until I decide I’m done with it.”
The Adversary by Michael Crummey is published by Vintage Canada. Michael Crummey is the 30th winner of The Dublin Literary Award, sponsored by Dublin City Council.
