Louise Kennedy on Trespasses, Chef Years and Her New Novel Stations

Louise Kennedy is about to publish her second novel, Stations, four years after her debut Trespasses was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's prize for fiction and adapted for Channel 4 in a production starring Gillian Anderson.

The TV adaptation aired last year, with Anderson playing the mother of Cushla, the young Catholic teacher who falls in love with Michael, an older, married Protestant lawyer, in 1970s Belfast. Trespasses also won prizes in Ireland and the UK in 2022 and 2023.

Speaking from the sitting room of her house in Sligo, which she shares with her husband, son and daughter, Kennedy recalled how close the family came to losing that home. The couple bought it "for stupid money" in 2007, the same year they opened a restaurant that initially thrived. The following year, the financial crash descended on Ireland. Their customers ebbed away, and the Celtic Tiger years gave way to a country racked with job losses, bankruptcies and apparently endless debt.

"I didn't think I'd ever be able to keep the house," Kennedy said, glancing around an elegant room dotted with plants and beautiful objects. "I'd say we only got out of negative equity about a month ago. There are probably arguments for moving now, but I'm so proud that we managed to hold on to it, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to be carried out of here in a box."

Kennedy spent 30 years as a chef before turning to fiction, working from Dublin to London and, for two years, Beirut, before settling in Sligo, on Ireland's west coast, not far from the border with her native Northern Ireland. She had never given a thought to writing, she says — not since a teacher admired a poem she wrote when she was seven. A cancer diagnosis inspired her to start writing.

Her literary output now includes the short story collection The End of the World Is a Cul-de-Sac, Trespasses and, forthcoming, Stations, a novel that draws on her teenage years. The title of the source interview gestures at the larger story of her family's migration: "We left Ireland because there wasn't work — and we wanted to get the hell away."

Stations arrives with Kennedy's profile higher than ever, boosted by the Channel 4 adaptation that widened her readership beyond the prize juries. Her trajectory from restaurant kitchens to a Women's prize shortlisting in midlife now stands as one of Irish letters' more striking second acts.