In December I was asked to write a short piece on my top five novels of the year. Some of my choices were agonised over: what to leave in, what to leave out, but the book I knew without question would remain on my list was Lucy Caldwell's The Meeting Point. I reviewed the novel last January, and have spent the subsequent twelve months singing the praises of this beautifully written and gracefully told story. Set in Bahrain in the period immediately prior to the Iraq War, The Meeting Point tells of an uneasy alliance between Ruth, the lonely wife of an Irish missionary, and troubled local teenager Noor.

Caldwell and I meet, appropriately enough, on St Lucy's Day. The festive air of the run-up to Christmas is magnified by the fact that Caldwell is celebrating having just finished a draft of her third novel (I was lucky enough to get a not-to-be-divulged synopsis). It's late afternoon so we politely order coffee, only to both eventually admit that we wish we'd ordered wine instead.

Although The Meeting Point was published at the very beginning of the year, it 's recently been back in the limelight after winning the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers. Described by the judges as a "beautifully written and mature reflection on identity, loyalty and belief in a complex world", Caldwell's novel was chosen from an exceptionally strong shortlist, including Tea Obreht's Orange Prize-winning The Tiger's Wife. This seems like the perfect end to the year, winning the prize and then finishing a first draft of her next book, so I'm keen to find out how Caldwell's been celebrating.

"That's what my students asked when I won," Caldwell laughs (she's a lecturer on the Creative Writing MA at City University), "but I told them, 'Actually, I'm at my desk working.' I want to set a good example for them of course," she continues, "but really, you're only as good as your next piece. You have to keep writing."

As well as working on her third novel, Caldwell has been adapting Diana Wynne Jones' children's book Witch Week for BBC Radio 4 Extra. She's absolutely delighted when I tell her that I know the story. "Don't you think it'll make such an excellent radio play?" she asks gleefully, "I'm so excited about doing it, it's such a chilling story."

Has she ever considered writing children's stories herself?

"Oh yes," she replies, "I've always wanted to write a children's series. Something like The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper for example. I think that books you read at that age remain with you for longer and are more powerful than a lot of things you read as an adult. Perhaps it's because you're more fully formed as an adult; it takes something more to affect you."

Also a prize-winning playwright, Caldwell won a place on the young writer's programme at the Royal Court after leaving university. Her play Leaves (2007) was later performed there, and she has also been writer-in-residence at the National. She'd taken her first play to Edinburgh after university, she explains, and the play script got into the hands of someone at the National who then asked if she'd like to come in for an attachment. Surprisingly enough, her immediate response was one of horror, precisely because "it seemed like such an amazing opportunity". But luckily she decided to give it a go. She was waiting for her first novel, Where They Were Missed, written while she was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, to be published at this point, and in fact found her eight weeks with the theatre "amazing".

(read more)

Leave. Close the door on home. Drift to a new world and its possibilities. Here comes spontaneity, adventure, risk, and the one guarantee, transformation. Lucy Caldwell's novel, The Meeting Point, probes displacement when it comes up against discovery, discovery that a trusted partner can pick and choose lies, that the bite of temptation is deep, and that companionship meets at the most unlikely of intersections. Which way to go?

Travel to Bahrain. The Meeting Point tells the story of an Irish pastor and his wife and child entering the kingdom of the desert. Pursued by the breaking of their bonds with faith, with each other, new bonds coupled to the stubbornness of survival embodied in the Tree of Life, the 400-year-old tree that stand alone in the desert, roots deep to the source of life itself, water, 160 feet down. The locals consider the location to be that of the Garden of Eden.

A bold novelist takes the big bite - life and death, the metaphors within, identity and symbolism. Lucy Caldwell grew up in Northern Ireland, a fertile ground for all of that. She was not tribal, yet not entirely free from the intersection of death, once the signpost to the province.

Writing by email, she told me, "I grew up used to slipping between identities, personae. One parent English, and the other Irish, one Catholic, one Protestant. I always felt other. For a start, I never quite had the accent; always had the vowels and inflections of my Bristol-born mother. Growing up, I was frequently asked: Where are you from? And when I said, From here, people would say, No, but where are you really from? So I always had a sense of outsidership, of not quite belonging, of being two - sometimes conflicted - things at once. "

When I met Lucy Caldwell in San Francisco in October as part of the city's annual Litquake Festival, over a beer, I suggested that her writing was affected by the bloody history of Northern Ireland.

She reflects on our conversation, "We discussed this in the pub in San Francisco, and for a long time after I haven't been able to stop thinking about that phrase you used: 'a culture of death'. You said you saw it in my work, too: the child who dies in my first novel, the failed suicide in my second, the investigation into teen suicide in my first play, the teenager who's terminally ill in my most recent play...I was taken aback to think of it like that. It sounds so obvious, when you line it up like that but I was a bit lost for words, wasn't I!

"Yet I don't think of it like that. It makes my work, for a start, sound very dark and depressing. And always, when I'm writing about death, what I'm really writing about is life and how to live: how life goes on, because it always does, and that's what interests me most.

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(Belfast Telegraph, December 5 2011)

Award-winning Northern Ireland author and playwright Lucy Caldwell tells Stephanie Bell about married life and how she has fallen in love with her home town after living in London for many years

When Lucy Caldwell came back to Belfast four years ago, she found the city she couldn’t wait to escape from when she was 18 had been transformed beyond recognition. And quite unexpectedly she found herself falling in love with it for the first time.

The award-winning writer says she was dumbfounded to discover Belfast was buzzing and even now is in awe of the changes that have taken place in her absence.

“When I was growing up, Belfast felt very small and all I wanted was to leave and discover the bright lights of London,” she says.

“Even in peacetime, my school friends and I used to talk about how we'd get away, and where we'd go.

“In the end most people didn’t go, but I did and I promised myself that I would never return.”

Having just turned 30, Lucy has spent all of her adult life living in London but since that trip home in 2007 she has been increasingly drawn back to Belfast and now divides her time between the two cities.

To Lucy it was like discovering somewhere new: “There were plays, talks, gigs, new designer boutiques and smart little cafés and bars, nightspots like the Potthouse and Café Vaudeville. There was the Cathedral Quarter, jammed with new restaurants and pubs, and already home to more than 50 arts organisations which was heaving, even on a cold and wet Sunday evening.

“For the first time, it struck me that perhaps I'd go back, one day, for good. It felt extraordinary to be entertaining the possibility that there'd come a point when I'd choose Belfast over London. It was a giddy — and unsettling — feeling, like the start of a new love affair.” (read more)

Lucy Caldwell is a novelist and playwright hailing from Northern Ireland. Her work has been performed on stage and on air for the likes of the Royal Court and BBC – the latter being one in a host of estimable institutes who have awarded Lucy for her published endeavours. Her stripped back writing style allows her to navigate the psychological minefields of her characters, where timeless preoccupations – love, death, sex, and identity – are given compelling contemporary treatment.

Lucy admits she found the process of selecting her choices somewhat stressful, saying: “Here are my five books, with a caveat that if I’d come up with this list an hour earlier, or later, it might be completely different. For the sake of sanity, I’ve stuck to fiction, too: I haven’t even turned around to look at the bookshelves on the back wall where my plays and poetry are. I couldn’t begin to narrow it down to five if they were included, too. Needless to say, I can’t live without my Collected Chekhov and my Selected Louis MacNeice, so you’ll have to let me have those, too.” (see original post at It's Nice That)

The Observer, Sunday 27 February 2011

A week before I went to university, I massacred my diaries. It was bloody. I chose a day when my parents were both at work and my sisters at school, and went around the house excavating journals from their hiding places. Under a floorboard, behind a radiator, in the cavity beneath a chest of drawers. Some I had already gagged: wrapping them round and round with masking tape so that my sisters couldn't read them. One was still locked with its flimsy gilt padlock, the key long misplaced. I heaped them up on the kitchen table and set to work. I ripped clusters of pages from their various leatherette backings and bruised my hands trying to tear apart Black n' Red notebooks, my most recent phase.

There was an old school jotter only part-filled with facts about the Black Death, before my own tribulations took over. There was a fat Five Year Diary beginning in 1993: a particularly prolific year; I'd filled up all the space for the next half-decade within a few months. A Letts pocket diary was crammed with tiny, painstaking code: a code devised by substituting letters of the alphabet for others, according to a scheme I not-so-craftily set out on the back page. It is surprisingly difficult to rip up large chunks of paper. By the time I'd finished, my hands were raw with paper cuts. I swept the bits into a binbag and drove to the dump, where I distributed handfuls among all of the skips. There was something ritualistic about it, climbing up and down the steps of each skip, standing at the maw and scattering my previous selves, like ashes. (read more)

Belfast Revisited:
Lucy Caldwell returns to a brighter city
Interview with The Independent

When I was growing up, I couldn't wait to get away from Belfast. It was small and boring, introverted and self-obsessed; there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.

I was born into one of the darkest and most turbulent years of the Troubles: the year the hunger strikes began, when within a few months Bobby Sands and nine others died; when things seemed to be spiralling irrevocably out of control. It was also the year that the first integrated school, Lagan College, was founded, in what was a desperate, hopeful bid to pre-empt future conflict and dissipate sectarian division by letting - by ensuring - that Protestants and Catholics mixed.

There were times, I think, when peace seemed not only unlikely, but impossible. But 13 years later, an end to the conflict was finally declared. The 1994 ceasefires and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement were - of course - huge political milestones: theoretically, Northern Ireland could now begin to flourish in terms of the arts, property development, nightlife, tourism.

But it seemed to me that all the opportunities lay elsewhere, across the water. Even in peacetime, my school friends and I used to talk about how we'd get away, and where we'd go. In those early teenage years, it was all the rage to say that you wanted to be a marine biologist - ie swim with dolphins - and live in California. In the end, of course, most people stayed, as most people do. But I left, as I'd always promised myself I would. I promised myself, too, that I would never return. (read more)