Joining John and Andy this week are novelist Patrick McCabe and Unbound's editor-at-large Rachael Kerr. We got together to discuss Dermot Healy's remarkable second novel A Goat's Song (1994) and the peripatetic life of its author, one of the great Irish writers of recent times. Patrick, Rachael and John all knew, worked and occasionally drank with Dermot Healy and this special episode reflects their personal connections with a much-loved and much-missed man.

Patrick McCabe is the author of The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction and along with Breakfast on Pluto was both shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a feature film by Neil Jordan. His novel Winterwood was named the 2007 Hughes & Hughes/Irish Independent Irish Novel of the Year. His fourteenth novel, Poguemahone will be published in April 2022 by Unbound. It is decribed by his editor as combining the supernatural terror of Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, with the experimental élan of Lanny by Max Porter and the mesmeric ventriloquism of Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman.

Rachael Kerr is a publisher and has worked for Cape, Picador and Harvill and is now editor-at-large for Unbound. Rachael has previously appeared on episodes 44 (Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur), 83 (D.H. Lawrence’sThe Rainbow), and 87 (Bruce Chatwin’s Utz). She is still married to John.

Also in this edition Andy considers the most recent novel of another legendary Irish writer, Girl by Edna O'Brien; while John shares his admiration for Shola Von Reinhold's LOTE, winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2021.

Books mentioned:

Dermot Healy - A Goat’s Song; The Bend for Home; Sudden Times; Long Time, No See; Banished Misfortune; The Reed Bed; Collected Poems
Patrick McCabe - Poguemahone; The Butcher Boy; Breakfast on Pluto; Winterwood
Shola von Reinhold - LOTE
Luis Sagasti - A Musical Offering
Edna O’Brien - Girl; James Joyce
Alistair Macleod - Island: The Collected Stories
Barbara Pym - Crampton Hodnet
James Joyce - Ulysses
Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano

Other links:

Planxty playing The Blacksmith on The Late Late Show, 1972
The Writing in the Sky (Gary Keane, 2011) Dermot talking to poetry class, Heaney reading poetry, Bill Swainson chatting to DH
Bill Swainson discusses DH on The Last Word, Radio 4
Dermot Healy Tribute on RTE, 2014
Dermot Healy interview with Timothy O’Grady in Wasafiri (2010)
Dermot Healy acts in I Could Read the Sky (Nichola Bruce & Tim O’Grady, 1999)