Events at the Shop
Sebastian Barry and Richard Mason - The Secret Scripture and The Lighted Rooms
Thursday 1 May 2008
On the publication date of Sebastian Barry’s Costa-winning The Secret Scripture, the London Review Bookshop paired him with Richard Mason: the elderly female protagonist of The Lighted Rooms must also deal with the unreliability of memory (and indeed, reality). Lively audience questions rounded off the evening.
Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself
Listen now (16:07)
Sebastian Barry introduces and reads from The Secret Scripture.
Joan’s Portal to Experience
Listen now (15:42)
Richard Mason introduces and reads from The Lighted Rooms.
Audience Questions
Listen now (27:41)
Barry and Mason answer a varied and lively set of audience questions, covering, inter alia:
- The relative distance of the reader from the narrator in the two novels
- Barry’s shift from poetry to prose over his career
- What it’s like to write about members of your family
- Whether Roseanne in The Secret Scripture is an allegorical figure
- How much of Mason’s original vision has been retained through the book’s many revisions
- Whether either writer shares their work-in-progress with others
- How exactly each has managed to make dementia entertaining
- The difficulties – or lack of them – in representing old women as the repositories of wisdom and truth in each novel given their respective backgrounds
- Why each has chosen to write from a woman’s perspective
- The difficulties – or lack of them – in separating fiction from the real people that may inspire their characters
Recorded and edited by Adrian Leibowitz and Brett Wilson
Common Custom:documentary & archive
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include The Steward of Christendom, Our Lady of Sligo and The Pride of Parnell Street. His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture. He has won, among other awards, the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize. A Long Long Way, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Dublin International Impac Prize, was the Dublin: One City One Book choice for 2007. The Secret Scripture won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. He lives in Wicklow with his wife and three children.
Richard Mason was born in South Africa in 1978 and now lives in Glasgow. His first novel, The Drowning People, was published when he was 21 and still a student at Oxford. It sold over a million copies in Germany alone and won Italy’s Grinzane Cavour Prize for the Best First Novel. His second novel, Us, also became an international bestseller. Both are now in development as major motion pictures. His third novel, The Lighted Rooms, was published in May 2008.
Further Reading
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