“THE CITY IS ALMOST A CHARACTER”: A CONVERSATION WITH CAITRIONA LALLY

Abstract

Caitriona Lally has published two novels, Eggshells (2015) and Wunderland (2021). She won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2018 and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 2019. She was the inaugural Rooney Writer Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub in 2022, and was one of the 2024 New Voices 20 Best New Irish Writers. Her first memoir, Home Economics, was recently published by New Island.

The following conversation was conducted for the special issue “Irish Studies: Legacies and Futures” of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia. The issue returns to the twenty-five years that have passed since the founding of Babeș-Bolyai University’s MA Programme in Irish Studies, while also asking how Irish literature might respond to the ethical, social, and ecological uncertainties of the present. Lally’s work is particularly relevant to this retrospective and prospective frame because it joins a strong sense of place to a sustained interest in marginal lives, precarious labour, linguistic dislocation, and forms of belonging that remain provisional or difficult to name.

The interview also follows Caitriona Lally’s visit to Cluj-Napoca in December 2024, when she participated in the events marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Irish Studies MA Programme at Babeș-Bolyai University. During the workshops held in Cluj-Napoca and Sibiu, students responded with particular intensity to the hyperlocal Dublin of Eggshells, often recognising in Vivian’s walks, observations, and estrangements something unexpectedly close to their own experience of the city. This recognition, across different cultural and geographical contexts, provides one of the starting points of the conversation below: how a fiction rooted in very specific streets, words, and social atmospheres can travel, and how the most local forms of attention may open onto wider questions about Irish writing today.