Do you have any early memories of being attracted to writing or literature?
I was a big reader as a kid and I would pretty much consume everything put in front of me. When my mum used to say to me to pick a story for her to read to me before bed, I would always come back with about 15 books.
I just wanted to read and reread stories and I wanted to be immersed in language. I would watch the ticker on Sky News and I would read the news. I was always looking for new words and I was always sounding out words that I didn’t know.
Did you write?
I was off school when I was quite young, I had a bug or something like that, and I wrote a story about a man who was beheaded when Henry the Eighth was king. I think I had been watching “Horrible Histories” and I wrote this quite graphic story about a public beheading. I showed it to my mum and obviously she was horrified, but she was also encouraging me to write at the same time.
Was there any support at home or at school?
Support at home was immeasurable. My mum had worked in libraries and bookshops and she had grown up on the Shankill Road and had gone to Queen’s University and studied law. She definitely instilled in me the potential in and importance of education. My dad is such a huge support for me as well. He isn’t a reader, but he encouraged me when I was young to get interested in the cultural pillars I value equal to poetry now: particularly music and sport.
The primary school I went to was on the Ballygomartin Road and it was quite underfunded at the time, I think around half the kids were on free school meals. The kids who vitally needed a lot of support received it, but it meant that support in my early creative stuff just wasn’t available.
What about High School?
I really took a step back from writing when I went to high school. I remember there was a little piece of work you had to do and that was to write about what you wanted to do after school. I wrote that I wanted to study medicine at Cambridge. It didn’t take me long to realise that I wasn’t any good at science!
I did end up loving English at high school, and it was the English teachers at my school who were most encouraging. I decided I wanted to be an academic and do research. My mum was able to put me in for work experience at Queen’s University, in the English Department, actually that was just before Lockdown, January 2020. I had a week of work experience with a lecturer, Justin Livingstone. That just blew my mind.
I went to a class taught by the poet Stephen Sexton that week, and I had just read his first book. I had just started to write poetry, awful teenage poetry about people I fancied and about the kind of feelings you have as a teenager, pretty depressing really. But I told him I was interested in writing and he let me know that you could actually do that as a job. That was so encouraging and necessary, and I decided then to focus on that as a career. I was 17.
