“An artist, first and foremost”: An Interview with Sara Baume

Sara Baume has become one of most brilliant recent voices in the literary and artistic panorama of contemporary Ireland. She has managed to combine in a unique way an already established career as a writer with her vast knowledge of art and her own artistic projects. Baume has written two unanimously critically acclaimed novels, spill simmer falter wither (2015) and A Line Made by Walking (2017) and a handful of short stories which have been published in prestigious literary magazines and collections such as The Stinging Fly, Granta, The Moth, The Dublin Review, or The Davy Byrnes Collection. More recently, she published Handiwork (2020), a most intimate account of her life, interests and projects as a writer and as an artist, as well as a deeply felt personal homage to the figure of her dead father. In the present interview, the writer comments on the contemporary panorama of Irish literature, on the social and economic changes that have taken place recently in her native country, and on the two languages between which she has always felt caught, the one that goes down on paper and the one that goes down in small painted objects. These two languages have been put at the service of one of the most obvious and recurrent interests of the writer, her endless fascination for and deep concern with nature and animals.