For the multi-award-winning author, whose new novel is Where Are The Kings, not making a show of himself is a primary considerationSat Aug 08 2026 - 06:00 • 6 MIN READIt’s not often you ask a question and get quoted, word-perfect, a Shakespearean sonnet by way of reply. I am sitting in a Dublin city-centre hotel with the novelist Donal Ryan, and have just asked him what turning 50 in February of this year meant to him.“It doesn’t really mean anything to me, to be honest,” he says. “There is no point worrying about your age. You can do nothing about it.”Then he quotes the first four lines of Sonnet 60, in a low and sure voice. Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore,So do our minutes hasten to their end;Each changing place with that which goes before,In sequent toil all forwards do contend.“It just expresses perfectly the march of time. The irrevocability of time. The fact we are all prisoners. Time is a theme in nearly every story I write.”Ryan is the author of eight novels and one short story collection. He’s won an impressive armful of prizes for his work. They include six Irish Book Awards, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and the Guardian First Book Award. He is proud of them all, but the most meaningful one remains the first award he won.“I won Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, which I literally could not believe. Madeleine Keane was up on the stage and called out my name. I nearly fell on my way up to the stage out of shock. It was great; it was such a lovely feeling. It shouldn’t matter as much as it does to win an award because writing isn’t a sport.”‘Growing up in rural Ireland, it’s good advice not to make a show of yourself’— Donal RyanRyan was writing stories as a small boy, and all through his teenage years. Nothing remains of it; dumped in a house clear out. “They were thrown into a skip by mistake. My parents kept them for years and years, all my so-called juvenilia, all the stuff that you write when you are young and in your teenage years. It’s a terrible shame because it would be great to have it now.”After a career in the Civil Service, Ryan has been working as an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Limerick since 2017. He mostly writes his novels in the summer. Working between his converted attic and his university office, first drafts take between 10 and 11 weeks. “When I’m writing a book, there is part of me thinking I have to get this finished,” he says. “And it must be publishable and saleable, because I need the money for it. It is a big part of my income. I wouldn’t be able to throw my hat in and say I’ll go full-time writing because it is too uncertain.”Ryan and his wife Anne Marie – who is also his “agent and manager” – have two children, Thomas (18) and Lucy (16). “Having two kids who are just coming to the end of their school career,” Ryan cites as a key motivation to earn. “We have expenses that everybody has. Bills come in the door. Jesus Christ, it’s unbelievable the size of them. Nobody should be getting the bills we are getting now for gas and electricity,” he says. “Life is expensive.”Donal Ryan: 'I’m always worried I’m going to upset somebody.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Ryan admits he is a worrier (although not about turning 50, as he has already said). “I never stop worrying nonstop; about everything. From the minute to the infinite. My grandfather used to worry about the light in the fridge; whether it went off when he closed the door or not. Fridges were new to him when I was a child, and he was obsessed with the idea of that light in the fridge. He would say: ‘Is that light definitely going off when the fridge door is closed because if it’s not, it’s going to drain electricity?’ He’d look at it like that. That’s the kind of thing he’d be worried about.”Ryan might not worry about whether the light in his own fridge goes off when closed, but he does confess to worrying about many other things. His teenage son going out at night in Limerick. “I am a big ball of complete and utter anxiety whenever he is in town,” he says. “I’d worry about things like our house being timber-framed and is that a fire hazard? I’d worry about chargers being left in and causing a fire at night. I have to check and double check and triple check all the sockets at night.” Then he says. “This is all very normal stuff. I think everyone is the same really.” He also worries about media interviews, which is unfortunate, as we are in the middle of one when he tells me this. “Between now and the time this is printed in The Irish Times, I will be nervous and depressed and regretful, thinking I shouldn’t ever be a published writer.” Then he says that for him, doing media interviews is “almost a profanity”.What about all the awards, all the success, I ask. Surely he believes in his own considerable talents at this stage of his career? What is he worrying about? “I believe in myself as a writer, but nothing else,” he says. “I wouldn’t be front or centre at parties. I’d try to avoid making a show of myself, to be honest. The idea of my name and my photo being in the paper to me is just – I’d prefer anything else in the world. Growing up in rural Ireland, it’s good advice not to make a show of yourself. [ From the archive: ‘To be honest, the reason I became a writer was to impress my wife’Opens in new window ]“And being in a newspaper is literally making a show of yourself. You’re putting your face in a newspaper. You’re saying stuff. It’s part of the contract when you’re published that you have to do publicity, but I’d prefer to do anything else. It’s the idea of strangers looking at me, do you know what I mean?”I honestly don’t know what Ryan means. Why do you care what other people think, I ask. “I don’t really. I just feel exposed. It’s not the kind of person I am,” he says. “I’m always worried I’m going to upset somebody. You can train yourself to be more confident than you are. But I don’t think you can change the essence of yourself at a cellular level.”One thing Ryan surely should not worry about is his latest novel, Where Are The Kings, which is published next Thursday. It’s the story of only child Jack, who is 12 when his mother dies by suicide, and whose troubled father subsequently goes to spend time in an institution. Jack goes to live with his maternal grandparents and their family. Told from Jack’s unreliable narrator perspective over a period of a few years, it’s a beautifully written – and frequently funny – exploration of grief and the struggle by so many to understand an inexplicable death, particularly by the child left behind.Donal Ryan: 'I believe in myself as a writer, but nothing else.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill At one point, Ryan writes: “Mam was guillotined from Jack, leaving him headless and dead with no pain left. As good an analogy as any.” It is indeed the finest of analogies for the traumatic loss of a parent. As for what is next, Ryan is currently taking a break from writing. “It’s the first summer in a good few years where I haven’t had a very focused project that I was trying to get finished by the end of the summer,” he says with obvious relief. “My wife bought me a hammock as a kind of a joke, so I can relax. You know, one of those ones in a frame. It’s just the most amazingly comfortable thing I’ve ever lain in in my life. Lying in the hammock and looking up at the sky and knowing I don’t actually have to get back to my desk, that there is nothing pressing, it is bloody brilliant.” Where Are The Kings by Donal Ryan is published by Doubleday.Rosita BolandRosita Boland is Senior Features Writer with The Irish Times. She was named NewsBrands Ireland Journalist of the Year for 2018IN THIS SECTION