Worth more than the paper it's written on

Tony Clayton-Lea speaks to Joe O'Connor, the author of The Star of the Sea, about his hard-won success

Slowly but surely, Irish writer Joe O'Connor is making his mark. If it seems that he's only been around and about for the past five years or so (notably through the international success of his novel The Star of the Sea), then you'd be wrong. Add another 10 or so years on to that and you'd have more of a chance of getting it right.

In O'Connor's words, before he started writing seriously, he was just messing around University College Dublin in the early 80s, a trip to Nicaragua in the mid-80s, and then a period of time in the rarefied environment of Oxford, where he commenced a doctorate.

"I didn't like it much, though," he says of the time and the work. "Oxford is a lovely place to live, but I felt doing a doctorate was in some ways a narrowing thing – essentially, it's a qualification to work in a university, but I didn't really want to do that. I was going to lectures in wonderful halls, soaking up the atmosphere, and then going back to my room and writing short stores and fiction. My whole impulse was to do that. I left after a year and was glad I did. I worked in London for a year, for the Nicaragua Solidarity campaign, and then did journalism."

O'Connor has been writing ever since. Where there rough patches in those early days? He nods his head. "I was writing short stories in London and sending them off to tiny magazines in Newcastle and places like that. If any of them had taken the stories it would have meant the world to me. I remember trudging down to the post office and posting that week's short stories, and by the time I trudged back to the flat it seemed that the rejection slips were already back."

The worst, he recalls, was the letter about the work that ended up as his first novel, Cowboys and Indians. "It was letter of rejection that said not just that the novel wasn't for them, but that it wasn't for anyone, and in fact their advice was that I should stop, that I had no future as a writer. I remember it was on a Wednesday morning, which was the day I signed on the dole. I walked down to the dole office in shoes that had holes in them, and it was raining. I got back to the flat and read that letter – I just got into bed and stayed there all day. I suppose you have to have a few of those mornings, because I do think a writer has to be tough. But writers also have to have funny traits; there has to be a type of sensitivity in being able to do it, but you need to be tough, and you're exposed. Rejections sometimes help people to decide one way or the other whether they should continue."

What made him decide to carry on, then? Surely such a level of rejection for all his hard work would have made him wary of continuing? "In my teens I wouldn't have imagined I'd be doing it full time. Ireland was very different then. We'd all like to believe it was all about poets and writers, but the Dublin that I grew up in – and we're talking about the late 70s - wasn't like that at all. There was no literary scene, no workshops, festivals, readings. It was hard to even point to a writer that was around. Hugh Leonard lived close to my family - you'd see him around the place - and my parents had books by John McGahern, but the country seemed lonely in terms of literature."

O'Connor went through the tough early years by putting his head down and working; book followed book, works of fiction lay side-by-side with works of nonfiction, regular stints as a columnist for this or that newspaper and magazine worked alongside his regular appearances on radio and television.

A couple of years ago, O'Connor headed off to New York, a temporary visit that lasted over a year. There were two main reasons for the move from Ireland, according to the writer: "One is that it was a life purpose. Myself and my wife had talked about the possibility of living in New York for around a year before our kids got to the stage of settling into school and struck up friendships that would become important. We're both writers, and that gives you an enormous freedom not to be in an office everyday. And we thought to have that freedom, and to use it, as a kind of currency that you should spend was a good thing.

"The other reason is that I was writing a kind of a sequel to Star of the Sea, which was about the Famine and immigration. In the closing pages of that book the narrator points out that a large number of people who came to America in the 1840/50's would have ended up fighting in the American Civil War. I knew very little about it, but apparently over 150,000 Irish-born people fought in the Union army, and about 80,000 in the Confederate side. There were Irish battalions on each side, made up exclusively of Irish-born people, or people that had an Irish parent and who decided to define themselves in that way. So it was a very big part of the Civil War, a very big part of how the Irish were assimilated into American life. The story of our assimilation in America is a lot more complicated than we think it is; the willingness of the Irish to take part in the war meant that they were defining themselves as Americans."

When he thinks about the changes in his career over the years, O'Connor realises that he has been amazingly fortunate. Many writers, he relates, have a tough time; a lot of good writers can tell you the story of rejection letters and a gruelling 10 years before their books are published. "I had a couple of tough years," he says, "but in general I think I've been lucky, things have gone well. I'm sure there is a modicum of talent there, and I work very hard. But I'm very dedicated to writing, I write every day because it's important to me to try and get better. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that I like writing – I always have. If my career ended tomorrow, and if no one bought the books, I'd still write."

Redemption Falls, by Joe O'Connor, is published by Secker & Warburg.