Walter Scott Prize Interview
Lucy Caldwell's These Days won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize, Here, she talks about research, inspiration, and how her 8-year-old son and writing in lockdown made her realise history was being made in the present (interview by Rebecca Salt for the Walter Scott Prize) I have loved historical fiction since I first read Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety as a 17 year-old, about to study the French Revolution ...
The Edge Hill Short Story Prize: Interview
Lucy Caldwell was shortlisted for her collection, Intimacies. She was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels, several stage plays and radio dramas and two collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’, and she has also won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Canada and Europe) and the ...
How EM Forster inspired Lucy Caldwell to finish her story
A year before he died, EM Forster sent a parcel to Christopher Isherwood containing the manuscript of his novel, Maurice. The first draft of the novel, a story of homosexual love, had been completed almost 60 years earlier, but had remained unpublished. Homosexuality was still a criminal offence in England until 1967, and Forster had been an impressionable teenager during the trial of Oscar Wilde, his psych scarred deeply by ...
How EM Forster inspired Lucy to finish her story
A writing life’s long afterglow… Lucy Caldwell, the latest winner of a prize funded by the royalties of the novel Maurice, reflects on conquering shame. A year before he died, EM Forster sent a parcel to Christopher Isherwood containing the manuscript of his novel, Maurice. The first draft of the novel, a story of homosexual love, had been completed almost 60 years earlier, but had remained unpublished. Homosexuality was still ...
These days, though lost, will be all your days…
On writing These Days. As a toddler, my son was obsessed with Janet & Alan Ahlberg’s Peepo! It’s a day in the life of a baby, but in the background is the London Blitz: bombed-out buildings, a Zeppelin. Night after night I thought how, in our bedroom, part of a converted Victorian warehouse in East London, we would have survived the entire Blitz: but safety could be measured in metres, ...
Arena, RTE Radio.
Author Lucy Caldwell is back with a new book These Days, about a city under siege from a vicious four day bombing campaign ...
Open Book on BBC Radio 4
Chris Power talks with novelists Lucy Caldwell and Louise Kennedy about their new novels, both set in Belfast at intense moments of 20th century history, both treatments of women's lives at a time of war and conflict: Lucy Caldwell's These Days is the story of sisters Emma and Audrey during the terrifying Belfast Blitz of 1941, while Louise Kennedy's Trespasses is about a relationship between an older Protestant man and ...
“In ways it was a normal childhood…and yet”
(Irish Times) In Lucy Caldwell’s forthcoming novel, These Days, she describes bombed-out Belfast – the fire “cascading” into terraced houses, the bank so badly damaged it must be dynamited before it collapses, and street after street which has been completely destroyed. “Belfast is finished, people say. There is no way we can come back from this,” she writes. This was not the Troubles but the Belfast Blitz, a devastating series ...
