Featured Interview With Eddie Smyth
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
My first recorded appearance was in Dublin, Ireland, where, apart from a couple of cameo roles elsewhere, I wasted most of my youth. I’ve since re-located to a village called Slane in the county of Meath, where the cast include a couple of dogs and numerous fish.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
As a very young child in 1960s Dublin, we didn’t yet have the luxury a television set at home, so, if we weren’t playing outside, there wasn’t much else to do but read. Thankfully, I learned and loved to read before I’d even started school, and was writing my own little stories by the age of five. At school then, writing was the one pursuit that I really enjoyed, and at which I seemed to excel: I won commendations, prizes and even an award for a story of mine that was sent on my behalf to an Irish national newspaper, when I was still in the earlier classes at primary level. Which, though, mightn’t have been such a good thing: I was never too bothered about doing well at school after that, in the innocent belief that my future was already sorted.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
A difficult question because I’ve read so many authors, and never really thought about what genre their books might belong to. But, at a push, maybe what might be classed now as literary, visionary, or even, metaphysical fiction. I would seem to have a penchant too for dark comedy.
Some that stand out for me would be; everything published by J.D. Salinger including, of course, The Cather in The Rye, Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson, and The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
From an early age too, I was also very interested in music, and so would consider my influences to be musical as well as literary, particularly the lyrics of David Bowie, Talking Heads and The Psychedelic Furs, and I was certainly inspired by the irreverence and anti-establishment ethos of the Punk Rock movement.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The Revenge of The Stoned Rats (The novel previously known as The Prince): A new version of my, considered to be, darkly humorous novel The Prince, which was published in 1996. It focuses on the life and times of Billy Sikes, an extremely sensitive and imaginative boy growing up in Ireland in the 1970s, first as a child and then as a, seemingly, delinquent teenager. Neglected and abused by his adoptive family, particularly by a sociopathic female cousin called Agnes, his world is utterly changed when his mysterious half-brother, Herbert, suddenly arrives in to it.
It’s all told to a background noise of the preaching of the then all powerful Catholic Church, television news reports on the ongoing atrocities in Northern Ireland and the war in Vietnam, the warbling of popular music and the wisdom of Billy’s revered, older cousin, Anna.
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