Award -winning playwright and novelist Lucy Caldwell is one of the youngest writers to be shortlisted in the EDS Dylan Thomas Prize. In June 2004, her first short play, The River, previewed at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. It was subsequently produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Chapter Arts Centre and the Sherman Theatre (both in Cardiff) in the United Kingdom. She has written short stories for BBC Radio 4, Zembla magazine and the V&A Museum.

Her first novel, Where They Were Missed, was published in March 2006 by Penguin (Viking). Four months after publication, the novel was placed on the EDS Dylan Thomas Prize longlist.

In addition to writing, Caldwell works with the Pushkin Trust, a Northern Irish charity that teaches creative writing (dramatic and prose) to primary school children and their teachers. She also works with the Niamh Louise Foundation, a recently established charity seeking to address the problems of teen suicide in the Province.

Lucy Caldwell spoke about her writing and some of the concerns that influence her.

What is your novel about?

The novel is narrated by Saoirse (pronounced Seer-sha), a six-year-old girl growing up in Belfast in the late 1970s with her mother and father and younger sister.

Things are going badly wrong, but she is so little she doesn't quite understand what is happening, and during one heat wave summer, she and her little sister, Daisy, run wild in a fantasy world of their own.

But there is a tragedy, and the family splits apart; the second half of the novel takes place 10 years later, when Saoirse is going on 17, and living with her aunt and uncle in an isolated part of rural Ireland.

She discovers dark secrets in the family past, and decides to go back to Belfast to discover the truth about what happened during that fateful summer, and to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.

How long did it take you to write it?

I started off writing what I thought was a short story for a university publication called the May Anthologies, where lots of writers (including, most famously, Zadie Smith) have been discovered. But I suddenly realised that I'd written 10,000 words and the "story" was showing no signs of stopping!

I finished the first draft at university, and redrafted it during my M.A. in London and Where They Were Missed was published in March of this year by Viking/Penguin. (Incidentally, this month [September] sees the launch of the German translation — Sommer In Belfast - the first foreign-language edition!)

What are your main concerns as a writer?