Jan Carson
speaker
829 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 14 May
Jan Carson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The second of the big themes in the book is trauma and particularly trauma related to the North and how we've dealt with it.
And it's a book and an imagined space of two halves.
So there's one side of the islands, the archipelago is inhabited by humans.
The other side, as you mentioned, is the far side.
And I would call these almost haunted islands.
And for me as a writer, they work as kind of extended metaphors.
There's a line where someone says the far side is the space where we've dumped all of the stuff we don't want to deal with after the troubles.
Yeah, it was quite a strange Genesis story.
So I was on a residency in France that wasn't going particularly well.
Sometimes we writers get these questions.
Lucky deals where you get paid to hole up somewhere and write for a few months.
But writing a book about East Belfast and Eastern France, it wasn't gelling.
So I was a bit frustrated, and this email arrived with the subject line, as you said.
And I get emails like this quite often.
A lot of people think they've got ideas for your next book, and nine times out of ten, they really don't.
But this one included a newspaper article about one-time Prime Minister Terence O'Neill
Back in 1958, he was the finance minister for Northern Ireland and he had a number of crazy schemes.
But this one, I think, takes the biscuit.
He wanted to drain Lough Neagh and turn it into the seventh county of Northern Ireland and build a commuter town in the middle of the Lough, which understandably got laughed out of, you know, all the other politicians were like, this is ludicrous.
But I thought, gosh, that's a really interesting idea.
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