An Interview with Liadan Ní Chuinn
Catherine Hearn | Tolka, Web Only, July 2025
Having finished their new short story collection in almost one sitting, I was very glad to have the opportunity to speak with Liadan Ní Chuinn about their writing. Every One Still Here (2025) published by The Stinging Fly Press in March and Granta Books in July, has already been described by Kevin Power ‘as among the best Irish books of the 21st century’.
The collection is tied together by themes of grief and haunting; the ways that the past is ever-present, as the title alludes towards. These are stories of fragile, palpable lives being played out in a supposedly post-Troubles North of Ireland. In ‘We All Go’ a young medical student grieves for his father and attempts to unearth fragments of the life he lived and the violence he endured at the hands of the British state. In ‘Russia’, complex issues of colonialism and adoption become intertwined through the protagonist’s hesitant search for his missing sister. In ‘Novena’, the narrative switches between guilt-ridden fathers and martyred mothers, offering each characters’ perspective to the reader with neither judgement nor favour.
We conducted this interview via email in July. I was in Waterford and Liadan was at home in the North of Ireland.
— Catherine Hearn, July 2025
Catherine Hearn (CH): I read Every One Still Here over the course of two days, and wept when I finished it. I have never before encountered a collection where each story is so powerful and so profound. How did the collection come to be published in its current form? Did you have more pieces and whittle it down to these six stories? Were there editors or other writers that you turned to for advice?
Liadan Ní Chuinn (LNC): The book took a long time coming together. Some of the stories in it — ‘We All Go’, ‘Daisy Hill’ — are some of the first stories I wrote, and others — ‘Mary’, ‘Novena’ — are much newer. Years ago, I submitted a story to The Stinging Fly and they didn’t accept it, but they were very nice. The editor messaged me months later saying that they would use it, and that they could put me in touch with Thomas Morris. Once I had that connection, I wrote much more, because it felt like there was somewhere for the stories to go. It was suggested to me that I had enough stories for a collection a few years ago, but it didn’t feel finished: there were a lot of stories, but they weren’t a book. I knew that I wanted ‘We All Go’ to begin it and ‘Daisy Hill’ to end it. So I had some that were ready, some that I had an idea of but that I had to sit down and write: three of the stories have never been published before. I’m very grateful to all of the people who got us here, to Tom and Danny and Declan and Tracy.
CH: Your characters are exceptionally well drawn. I was particularly haunted by one image; on the last page of ‘Amalur’, the narrator details how her mother would break in her shoes for her: ‘she wore the shoes just until they softened and would never hurt me’. I found this painfully moving, coming at the end of a story about a fractured mother-daughter relationship. Do you begin your process by sketching out characters, their habits and histories, and then placing them in a scenario? Or vice versa?
LNC: It comes to me in little bits. Here’s a phrase that’s stayed with me, and here’s this action of care, of attention, and here’s where they’re sitting — I don’t know if it’s the usual way of doing it: putting the pieces together and then sitting and writing the pieces out into a story, all in one go — and the process of writing the story, then, is filling in the gaps.
CH: A later story, ‘Novena’, ends with Rita detailing all she had to endure to birth her children – immense physical pain, a broken back, lost teeth. Themes of motherhood and sacrifice resurface repeatedly in this collection, which I found particularly pertinent for stories set in the North. In the nationalist tradition, it is usually the sacrifices of men and fathers that are exalted. Were you purposely working to give women their dues?
LNC: I think a lot about what women do. How many of our families, our communities, function only due to the unpaid, unacknowledged labour of women? I think a lot about love, and attention, about all of the ways that people care for each other and how proud of that I am. I think a lot about this care, and this love, and I think a lot about it in the north particularly probably because I am aware that this is not the image that others have of us. I think a lot about women here during the war, imprisoned, interned, working and raising families and maintaining community as the people around them were imprisoned, interned — women like Bernadette McAliskey — the women who, together, faced off the British soldiers and ended the British Army’s occupation of the Falls Road. There is that slogan, Ní saoirse go saoirse na mban: there is no freedom until the freedom of women. We cannot talk of struggle without the women who formed it.
CH: More broadly, you write the immense difficulty of parent-child relationships with incredible precision. There are vast silences and unspoken pain hovering between generations in nearly all the stories. It seems like this intergenerational trauma is a theme that permeates your writing. Is that a fair assessment?
LNC: If it permeates my writing, I think it’s because it permeates my life. It’s a lens through which I make sense of my family, and my community. It’s in how our parents live, in our grandparents, and before them, and before them — all of it is in us still. Look at, throughout Ireland, people’s relationship with our own language, with our own land: these are not healthy, secure relationships. What has happened in the past is still playing out now. But there can be a misconception that we grew up with none of it, when the truth is that they are on the TV now: the British soldiers who murdered children in the north of Ireland will not stand trial, British soldiers carried out their difficult duties in a 'dignified and appropriate way’, and, the TV, the radio says: those soldiers deserve to live the rest of their lives in peace. My experience growing up was nothing like my parents’ or relations’, but it is not nothing to grow up hearing the government which still has jurisdiction over your territory speak in this way about the people it murdered. But this is the violence of the British state. And it does permeate how I write, how I live.
CH: The collection is bookended by two stories about the loss of a father. In ‘We All Go’ the narrator, Jackie, is left with a lot of unanswered questions about his father’s life and death. He is haunted by an event of which he has no memory. In the final story ‘Daisy Hill’, we read about a litany of real people who were murdered by the British forces in the North of Ireland. In telling their stories the way you do, you offer these victims agency and power, while also offering a vital space for grieving them. Reading both ‘We All Go’ and ‘Daisy Hill’, I was reminded of Sadiya Hartman’s theory of ‘critical fabulation’ which is a way of writing people back into history, combining historical research with a fictional narrative. Was that something you considered when writing these pieces? Or was there a different intention behind them?
LNC: I think that there’s been a dehumanisation of people in the north of Ireland. And I don’t mean in any way to overstate this, when we see the people of Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, being so systematically dehumanised. But I believe that the practice of dehumanisation is used so widely because it works. People in the north were dehumanised to such a level that British soldiers came over and murdered children and were, as Frank Kitson was mere weeks after Bloody Sunday, knighted for it. And people in the north were dehumanised by other Irish people to such a degree that I know, I can feel, how much many other Irish people hold us apart, even still. I know that the stories are unified by grief, but I also remember that they came, initially, from more of an anger. Most of it comes down to what Rowan keeps writing in the final story: I would care if this was done to you. British State Forces murdered people, but the State reported that it had not murdered people: it had murdered gunmen, murdered terrorists. But these were unarmed men, women, children. I deeply appreciate you saying that a space was created for grieving them, because that is what I think we need to be able to do. ‘Daisy Hill’ is written entirely in the present tense, and that was deliberate. Look at it, it’s happening. It’s happening still.
CH: Affects of guilt and shame run throughout the collection, often evidenced in silences and gestures of refusal. In ‘Russia’, in particular, the museum management are adamant that they will not admit guilt over their showcasing of corpses from colonised countries, and the piece ends with a carefully worded publicity statement. There are seismic conversations happening at the moment around the idea of ‘decolonising the museum’. I attended a historical museum in Berlin, and the exhibition, entitled ‘Africa’, was peppered with acknowledgements of wrongdoing, discussions of colonial extractivism, and references to the white gaze. Nonetheless, the exhibition continued to display reams and reams of stolen African art and artefacts to the European public. I read ‘Russia’ as an astute critique of this kind of lip service, but one which begins from a very personal and empathetic perspective. When writing this story, did you begin with the political, critical angle, or the narrator’s personal sense of loss and grief about his own identity and subsequent complicity?
LNC: Before I wrote ‘Russia’, I visited the Ulster Museum. This museum openly displays both the body of a young woman taken from Africa, and human bones found in Ireland. I was thinking a lot about humanisation, and dehumanisation, and I was genuinely disturbed by what the museum was doing. It felt so wrong to have seen these people and not to have brought them flowers, not to have brought them anything. It felt so wrong that they were there. After the book came out, I called in again. Just like the Berlin museum you’ve described, the Ulster Museum now has noticeboards and even a video installation. It’s a pretence. It is, totally, a lip service. It continues to display the dead people that it displays, and to keep the stolen cultural and historical artefacts that it has. Russia is, as you say, made up of two streams. Around the same time that I had first visited the museum, and was so disturbed by it, I was thinking about adoption, and in particular inter-national adoption. I was thinking about how, in the West, we romanticise it; how we celebrate, and even lionise, the adoptive parents, and side-step any other question about what it will mean, for a child, to be taken so far from where they’ve been born. Adoption is, I believe, an incredible and complex process. It’s deeply rooted, for us, in Gaelic culture. But it does have, at its heart, a fundamental grief. I realised that both of these strands could be looked at together.
CH: I was very invested in all your characters, but particularly intrigued by how you write men, and the morality of men. In ‘Mary’, Christy is “good” until he aids in trafficking women across the border for a significant sum of money, and then implicates the narrator in his actions. In ‘Amalur’ the protagonist’s boyfriend is good in that he is not abusive (like his brother-in-law) but he also stays silent about that abuse. In ‘Russia’ the protagonist feels overwhelming guilt about how he has treated his sister, as well as his complicity in the dubious action of the museum he works at. Over and again, men are left feeling guilty and complicit, but fail to take action or seek absolution. Is this complicity something specific to men, in your view, or maybe tied up in the expectations that we put on men?
LNC: I really like this question, in that it has made me think, but I don’t know what my answer is. I think I’m interested in general in how people have values until it is inconvenient to have them. And I am interested in the ways that men cause harm, or fail to prevent it.
CH: In ‘Mary’, the protagonist loses her job, but tries to find renewed purpose in a local creative writing group. It doesn’t go very well, and she feels alienated by the critiques and questions of the other members. What is your writing process like? Do you find that kind of group feedback useful, or do you prefer a more solitary practice?
LNC: I could never survive that kind of group feedback! I write in a way that is not just solitary but completely private, not even in a café or a library but absolutely on my own. I know that I’ve said it before, but I do tend to shrug off the word ‘practice’, which to me implies something regular, when I manage to write only sporadically and in bursts. I love to write when I can get a day all on its own, and I don't have to be anywhere or do anything else. Sometimes I can write a story in one sitting, if I can just have time to sit and put it together.
CH: Your voice is truly singular. I still remember being astonished by how pronounced you were in your writing style, when I first read ‘twenty twenty’ which we published in the first issue of Tolka. You have a rhythm, a cadence that marks all of your work. One example, from ‘Russia’: ‘Brian is going to scour the CCTV. Brian is going to find the perpetrator we know has already been active and we are going to think carefully about things like damage, criminal damage.’ There is a lot to analyse, even at a granular sentence level – the repetition, the planned future, the first person plural. Did it take time for you to establish this distinctive voice? And is it something you consciously work at, or does it emerge naturally as you put pen to paper?
LNC: Thank you for this. I really appreciate it. It’s not something I work at, or even think about, and in fact I try my hardest not to return to a story once it’s written: the fewer edits, the better. But I can’t pretend that it’s not coming from people around me. I love listening to people. I love how we tell stories, how we speak, how we talk about ourselves. This is my family, my neighbours, the people sitting near me on the train. And that rhythm you mentioned, it must be coming from them.
I want to thank you here, Catherine, for these questions, which have been incredibly thoughtful and detailed and have put me thinking.
Every One Still Here was published by The Stinging Fly in March and Granta Books in July
Catherine Hearn is an editor at Tolka. She is also the incoming Communications and Impact Manager at Skein Press.
You can subscribe to Tolka for a year and receive two issues for €22.
