What would you say sets the novel apart from other things you have written?

I wrote it in my early 20s, before I'd ever read much Joyce, or Flaubert, or Dostoyevsky, or many of the other writers who are so important to me today. And because it is the first "proper" thing I ever wrote, I think it has a rawness and energy and innocence that I'll never be able to capture again.

But then again, in a funny sort of way every single thing that you write feels as if it's the first thing you've ever written ...

In what way is it similar to other things you have written?

When I was growing up I couldn't wait to get away from Belfast. Once I left, I thought I'd never go back, and I was surprised — and not a little resentful — to find myself writing about Belfast.

But I am increasingly conscious of writing in an Irish, and a Northern Irish tradition — which, when you consider the great writers who have come from this part of the world, is something which makes me feel incredibly honored and humble — and now I am exceedingly proud to be Northern Irish.

And although this is a horrible generalization, I suppose that all of my writing, at some level, is "about" Northern Ireland, or at least shares a concern about what it means to be Northern Irish.

How have your personal experiences influenced the direction of your writing?

Everyone always assumes that my writing, especially Where They Were Missed, is strongly autobiographical. But it isn't at all!

I had a very happy childhood, and my poor mother is horrified by the number of people who've covertly wondered if she has an alcohol problem...

In his essay, "The Art of Fiction," Henry James writes of an English female novelist who was much praised for the "accurate" depiction she'd given of French Protestant boys, and asked how long it had taken her to do the research. She replied that once, in Paris, she had been walking up a staircase when she had glimpsed some youths eating around a table with their minister. And from that moment, she had created the whole world of her novel. "The glimpse made a picture," James writes, "and it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience."

I think that this explanation sums up perfectly what it is to write fiction: that although not everything I write about "happened," all of it is in some sense "true".

What would you say are the biggest challenges that you face?

As a writer of both novels and plays, my biggest challenge is always staying in control of whichever form I'm working in. If I've been writing a lot of prose, for example, I'll find myself giving characters in a play huge, eloquent, beautifully-written speeches which are absolutely dead on stage - because, of course, in a play it isn't what a character is saying that matters, it's what they're doing, or in other words, why they're saying it.