‘We had to learn that Irish people refuse tea three times when they come to your house’

Award-winning author Jen Thorp says Ireland ‘is one of the great countries for people doing literary work in English’Jennifer Thorp: 'I will have four books published by the time I’m 40. That’s astonishing by any metric.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Hosanna BoulterTue May 26 2026 - 06:00 • 4 MIN READJen Thorp (38), who is originally from Sydney but moved to Cork in 2018, does not miss the Australian weather.“Weather is not everything. And frankly, 42 degrees is too many degrees. If people ask me about the weather back in Australia, I will talk their ear off about the Irish Government funding artists,” Thorp says. Thorp, an author, was in 2021 named one of the recipients of the Markievicz Award. Each recipient gets €25,000, and the award aims to buy time and space for artists to develop new work reflecting on the role of women in Ireland in the 20th century and beyond. Thorp used the funds to write a work of literary fiction to be published in 2027. “Ireland is one of the great countries for people doing literary work in English. The level of support on a government and community level has been astonishing.” After winning the Markievicz Award, Thorp was accepted on to the Basic Income for the Arts programme, under which the Government provides some artists with €325 a week. That income gave her the time and space to write two murder mystery novels. She plans to apply for the programme’s next rollout also. “I am not sure that people outside of Ireland realise how extraordinary this is. It’s very boring to talk about money when you are an artist, and you are not supposed to care about these things, but you do. You’ve got to pay the bills.”Recently, Thorp was judged by Revenue to have produced works of significant artistic merit, which means she does not have to pay tax on earnings from her novels of up to €50,000. Her first novel, Learwife, published in 2021, was long-listed for a number of awards. [ From Australia to Inishbofin: ‘The girls are so free here. Life is easier. Their lives in Sydney were so structured’Opens in new window ]“I am an early-career artist, but because of the Irish Government’s support, I will have four books published by the time I’m 40. That’s astonishing by any metric – it would not have happened in any other country in the world.”Thorp grew up in what she refers to as “the very, very furthest edge of Sydney”. Her family lived on a peninsula that sits right on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Though she describes her childhood as idyllic, as Thorp grew up and realised she wanted to be an author, she felt herself coming up against a certain anti-intellectualism. She feels that sentiment is best illustrated in the idea of “tall poppy syndrome”: “If someone is seen as getting too big for their boots or excelling too much, they are a poppy that has grown taller than everyone else and has to be cut down.”Jennifer Thorp in Cork city. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill “Australia has a very strong kind of macho culture, lots of sexism, and I am also not a fan of a lot of the things that the right-wing governments over the years were doing.”She first moved abroad when she did an exchange year while at university, spending a term at the University of East Anglia in Britain. There she met a group of friends who she said are still her “most beloved people”. “I went back to Australia, and missed them so much that I went, ‘This is ridiculous. I live in the wrong country’.”For her master’s, she moved back to the UK and studied at Oxford, which is where she met her partner. The couple lived in Oxford for eight years until 2018, when her partner got a job working at University College Cork, and they have lived in Cork ever since. [ ‘Everyone is moving to Australia all the time. It doesn’t help with dating’Opens in new window ]“Cork specifically has been so good to us. My spouse has been ill, and the community rallied around us magnificently.”Thorp said the couple have awoken to find food placed on their doorstep, and have had people constantly asking how they can help.“There is this incredible level of intimacy and care from people who maybe don’t know us that well, but go, ‘Well, you’re one of us’.”Jennifer Thorp in Cork city. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill The couple see Cork as their “forever home” and would like to set down roots and buy a house there one day, though that day can seem quite far off, Thorp says. She laughs, a bit darkly, when talking about Cork’s housing crisis, saying “housing crises are not new to me”, as Sydney and Oxford are among the most expensive places in Australia and the UK to live. When asked about culture shocks she has experienced since moving to Ireland, only one thing comes to mind for Thorp: “We had to learn that Irish people refuse tea three times when they come to your house. What you are supposed to do is keep offering, but in the beginning we didn’t. We just assumed that they meant ‘No’ and so did not offer them tea. Finally, some of our Irish friends had an intervention where they went, ‘Listen, we’re just being polite. You have to ask two more times; then it is acceptable for us to say yes’.”By contrast, how much people regularly swear in Ireland made Thorp feel right at home. We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland in the past 10 years. 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