Sarah Kanowski

You've got to find another country and write poetry and you'd be ahead of the pack.

As a little boy, you were saying even just going to Wexford to go to the shops was an exciting adventure, let alone the summer by the beach.

So when you were old enough to have finished school and set off to university in Dublin, was this a chance to remake yourself the way that so many adolescents take that chance of first moving away from home and entering university?

Was it a new column who appeared in Dublin?

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?