Doireann Ní Ghríofa

speaker

408 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 24 May

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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Brendan O'Connor · “I was so moved by the experience of hopelessness I shared with these women” · 23 May 2026 podcast

And that felt, when I was researching the book, very much like a quest.

And I hope that comes across through the book.

Did you take risks for your art?

I did take risks for my art.

And I feel like this book represents a huge artistic leap for me, onwards from A Ghost in the Throat.

And the reason that I was driven to take such an artistic leap and to try to be brave on the page and to try and carry anyone who would like to pick up this book with me on the page is because I cared so much about

so much, Derval, for the women who were held in this institution.

And I wanted to discover all I could about their lives and what it might have been like for them living there.

And that kind of led me, I suppose, towards the doctor who was attempting to care for them.

Extremely important.

It was important for me to be...

And to have my being in some way and to walk and to feel what that remaining building was like.

So to kind of break into the ruins and to be there and to...

it's hard to describe.

There's a sense that I think a lot of other people, like I refer to myself as a bit of a history nerd, you know, and I think other people who would call themselves history nerds are aware of that, the sense of putting yourself in a ruin and almost making yourself absent to see what else will rush into that physical space.

And that's often, I know it sounds kind of woo-woo and absolutely

I don't really make apology for that.

I feel like part of my work as a writer is in making myself absent so that other people who lived in Ireland before can make themselves or their stories present through me.

And that was really what I felt wandering around those ruins.

The lives of the people who were held in this institution and who often died in the rooms that I was witnessing being demolished, in that case, in the old hospital part of the building, were so vivid and so vivid.

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