Louise Kennedy's Stations novel inspired by Belfast to Naas

Louise Kennedy is about to publish her second novel, Stations. The much-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut Trespasses is being promoted on a book tour, where she is discussing its deep roots in her own life.

Kennedy was in her hotel room in Edinburgh when discussing the book, having arrived the night before from The Queen’s Reading Room festival at Chatsworth. Her tour for Stations was beginning in earnest, with signings, interviews and talks to attend.

Background and Inspiration

Stations draws on Kennedy’s experience of moving from Belfast to Naas as a child, a shift that left her feeling culturally isolated. She was 12 in 1979 when her family relocated. Kennedy hated living in Naas. It took two years to get the phone connected there. There was only one television station.

Kennedy visited Belfast six weeks after moving and was shocked by her friend’s changed accent. She said she didn’t belong to either place after the move. She described herself as an 'atrocious adolescent' during this period. The new novel draws directly on this profound sense of dislocation.

Personal and Family History

Kennedy’s Catholic family background in Belfast further informs her fiction. Her family ran pubs in the city. Her grandmother was injured by glass from a bomb explosion while banking takings. An off-duty British soldier held her grandmother’s neck to stop the bleeding, and her life was saved by the fur coat she was wearing.

Her father was the only Catholic in a factory in East Belfast and was followed home from work. A Catholic neighbour of his was killed in a loyalist 'romper room'. Kennedy’s father later trained to become an accountant through evening correspondence courses. In another incident, her mother, grandmother, two uncles and a policeman were in a tunnel when a building was blown up.

Writing and Creative Process

Kennedy joined a creative writing group in 2014, set up by Una Mannion. She was persuaded to attend by visual artist Niamh Mac Cabe. She describes her memory as 'really strong, visceral' and says she remembers 'all the detail'.

She does not plot or plan her novels, describing Trespasses as an unintentionally 'plotty book'. She says Stations is about the choices a girl makes over her life and the people who come and go. A lot of the novel, she notes, is about regret.

Context and Reception

Her debut, Trespasses, set in 1975 Belfast during the Troubles, was a major success. It was adapted for Channel 4 in a production starring Gillian Anderson and Lola Petticrew, with screenwriter Ailbhe Keogan, who also worked on Bad Sisters. Kennedy served as an executive producer. The novel was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction and won other prizes in Ireland and the UK.

Stations follows a collection of short stories, The End of the World Is a Cul-de-Sac. It follows two misfit teenage protagonists, Róisín and Red, and progresses from the early 1980s to this century, moving from Ireland to London. Author Anne Enright has described Stations as 'a work of mourning and reclamation' that 'holds a national sorrow'.

Kennedy has said she left Ireland because there wasn’t work and it was a 'closed, judgmental, shithole theocracy'. She noted she could walk into a pub on Sunday mornings in 1980s London and feel like she was at mass. She also stated she would not have written Stations if she had written the Trespasses script herself. Her book tour for the new novel is now beginning in earnest.