Sarah Kanowski

Where did you get the idea to go to Barcelona after finishing your degree?

You had this idea to go off to Barcelona after finishing university in Dublin.

What did your mother think about this?

Not long after you arrived, Franco died.

It must have been an amazing time to be in the country.

Spain was having its liberation moment.

What about Colm?

Well, why on earth did you leave this hedonistic paradise to return to Ireland?

Did you already have the dream of being a writer at that point?

So how did that change?

It must have been a huge culture shock to come back from that time in Spain and that freedom for you personally to come back from, I imagine, a much more conservative Ireland in the 70s.

I was thinking you were talking about like gay life or sort of, you're talking about central heating.

Is that desperate?

Did you get pushback from readers or other people?

In this time as a reporter, you went to the Sudan.

What story were you covering there?

Your younger brother Niall, who you were staying with in the Sudan and with whom you'd had this pivotal early experience of being sent off to live with your aunt while your father was in hospital in Dublin.

Niall died from kidney disease in 2004.

You shared so many intense experiences together, Colm.

When you came to write about your childhood in novelistic form in Nora Webster,