 And you're very welcome back and as promised at the beginning of the show this evening I have Siobhan McGowan on the line with me Journalist and musician who lived and worked in London for much of her life before returning to Ireland several years ago She's from a family of great storyteller It's the most prominent of which is her brother Shane McGowan off the pokes that you just heard there Was dirty old town her first book the trial of Lota Ray has earned rave reviews And now she's just published her second one the graces and as I say, I'm delighted to have her on the phone line tonight Siobhan you're very welcome many thanks for taking time out to talk to me tonight, and I'm sure your schedule is pretty busy No, thanks Dean. No, it's great. It's lovely to talk to you Actually, I was in Dublin and we're on the road time to Kipper area And I was hoping that the rain was going to stop beating off the roof and the windows You'd be able to hear me, but luckily it has it has calmed down. Thank God fantastic that the the wonderful joys of Internet and and mobile phones So you've just published your second book the graces Siobhan was it something you always wanted to do to become an author Yeah, I mean right right from the very start and I mean right from a little girl really I always I had a vision of myself I had a vision of myself putting a book on a shelf when I was very very young and it had my name on it And I I just always wanted to do it So I did write so I did journalism and I wrote stories I wrote little plays and I wrote poems and I wrote songs And I always did what I want to write a novel but it took me a long long time to get the discipline to actually the the actual discipline sitting down and Starting and finishing a novel takes as you probably know I mean god it takes more than a year you have to actually really want to do this thing to finish it So it took me out into my late 30s actually until I was a I knew I was able to do that and Once I got that discipline. Thankfully, I never lost it. I'm very disciplined now And you've had quite a colorful career up until you became the author Of course as we've mentioned your sister to to Shane and you worked with the Pogues publishing their Fancy and that's a new word. I want to sort of look at what is a fancy magazine for fans? Yeah, I found that yeah So yeah, you dabbled at writing with that and then you were PA to Van Morrison for a number of years as well Yeah Yeah, the Pogues thing I was with the Pogues So I was doing freelance journalism and then I started to work in the Pogues office in London, Canton town And so I went and I did their fanzine their magazine fan club magazine for them and Was and traveled with them and was you know working with them and then I actually came to Dublin in about 1988 and I formed my own band called the frantic which we were frantic But we played around quite a lot of the old Institutions like Bagot Street and the Olympia and all that kind of stuff, but I was writing my own songs then The thing is that I actually Never really felt comfortable with the performance side of it I liked writing the songs, but I was never comfortable with the kind of music business side of things It wasn't really me, you know But having said that I then my sister-in-law introduced me to Van Morrison. We met at the Shelburne Hotel and He offered he just said to me would you like to go to America? And of course me being I was in my late 20s. I said yes, you know and so he took me on as his Personal assistant and I worked with him for two years and we traveled all across America and Europe and I mean it was fantastic. We went to I had never been to Los Angeles. I'd never been to San Francisco He took me to those places and I met people there like John Lee Hooker and Junior Wells and Jimmy Witherspoon all the great blues legends, which were heroes of mine, you know and ended up in their kitchen singing with them and It was just it was just like a dream really That must have been a wonderful experience for you indeed. Just even talking like meeting your ideal Idols like John Lee Hooker etc etc. So you were a singer you were a songwriter you you were a publisher and So obviously and then she and your your brother writing songs as well. So you must have come from a very creative background a creative home Siobhan Yeah, well look mom and dad were we both myself and Shane say they were extraordinary people I mean that my mother came from Tipper airy from a country background my dad was from Dublin But they were way ahead of their time, you know, they were very liberal thinkers very broad-minded very creative They raised us to really believe in ourselves and to speak for ourselves and to not necessarily believe everything We're told, you know the opposite of going to school and listening to what the teacher says We were told to challenge what we heard Think about things for ourselves and and a creative side I remember they even let me I mean actually the truth is myself and Shane wrote and drew from a very early age That was our number one thing that we loved doing writing drawing both of us and Mom and I actually I was wilder than Shane on that because I used to draw over my Bedroom walls and mum and dad used to let me but I mean You know, it was just a plain wall and they let me do it And when we used to come in those days, we'd get the ferry to Holly heads to cross to Dublin When we used to come to Ireland and we get myself and Shane would get a blanket and put it over us And he we'd be scribbling and writing and drawing there in the back all in the in the dark under the blanket doing our writing and drawing So yeah, we it was very creative dad himself writes a lot of satirical poetry and mum was a really gifted singer and You know magical kind of person So as as the old cliche says the apple didn't fall far from the tree Yeah, I think yeah, I think that I think that's true from both of them I think they were both very very unusual people And this is your second novel and you're saying that it's sort of something that you always wanted to do But to get it supposed to get a publisher like was there a lot of hard work getting your first novel published Shevon. Oh, yeah, I mean you see I told you that it took me into my late 30s to get the discipline It took me about 10 10 to 12 years to get published I wrote a children's story first and I got that published in my local paper the Nina Guardian and that turned into a novel and Then I wrote and rewrote that many times like learning my craft and but that didn't get picked up and then I wrote another adult novel and That got me what an agent in London, but she put it out some sub to publishers and that didn't get picked up and then what happened was my mother died suddenly and Completely, you know took the ground from under my feet, but the thing is that it was I found writing, you know, it's cathartic. It's always been my place of refuge. So I did write I kept writing through it, but it didn't produce my best work So my agent and I parted ways But I then started to write The Trial of Loss Array and that was the novel that got me my Publish my agent that I have now who is actually Irish Sarah O'Keefe. She originally comes from Waterford But she's worked 20 years and she's based in London. So I and she got me my first publishing deal So it was a long road to publication Excellent. So now this is your second one the graces and just give us a little Synopsis of what the storyline of the graces is Siobhan Yeah, okay, so it's about a young woman called Rosaline Moore who's born with the site So she's a seer and she said like her grandmother to be touched by the graces. So that's where the title comes from But when she sees too much in her native Claire She flees to Dublin and she's quickly taken in by a group of spiritualists called mesmerists And she becomes famed throughout Dublin a famed mystic known as the Rose Now the actual book is narrated from her deathbed. She's dying and she's speaking to a priest She's confessing herself to a priest and this is where her and within that Confession her last she makes the last extraordinary prophecy and that only sees her legend grow But she also makes another deathbed revelation about a tragedy in the community a Heenius crime that the communities once once loved but now in prison Dabba has confessed and she tells a different tale about that she tells Something else that might have actually happened that the truth might not yet be known about it and From what for from what I've read Some of the stories in the book that that are that Rose sees They've happened in real life or there were incidents in your own life that are that were similar Siobhan Yeah, well definitely what happened in the book Rosalind's grandmother is said to have the site And Rosalind inherits this but my own great-grandmother who was Margaret Lynch in Tipper airy was said to have the site and she actually foretold the death of her younger son and In the book that I I tell that faithfully I only changed the name So my own great-grandmother woke up in terror in the night She had dread gripping her stomach and she went rushing down to her younger son Tommy's Bed and begged him to stay close to the house that she couldn't see what it was But something dreadful dreadful was gonna happen to him and of course he was only 17 so he kind of left it off and My family had a thrashing machine that which was quite a big thing and they went around to all neighboring farms with it and It was it wasn't long after that There's nobody saw what happened exactly but he must have tripped out in front of the big thrashing Rotating wheel and he got caught up in its blades and unfortunately He was terribly maimed and he died instantly and my granate great granny when Rushing out into the fields and just wailed into the nice and I tell all that in the book But it's funny, isn't it? I mean that happened so many generations ago, but it's so it's as vivid to me now because it's handed down, you know and So you you you hear it when you're a child and it stays with you. So I think that came out in the book You know, I think that definitely came out and there's another story that you were kind as well of the face at the window Which is another yeah another episode a similar episode That's right. That was my mother so that was during the second world war which of course didn't touch Ireland. It was the emergency but There was that we weren't involved obviously but In mom that was brought up in the same house a great granny lived in with that house is still in our family It's still there so it's had generations of us there and mom was a young girl Maybe 1415 and there was a great family friend called Bill who was American and he used to come over and visit You know and the fact that he's even able to afford to do that in those days But so he was full of presence and style and mum just loved him and The thing is so during the war, of course, there was no visiting so mum one day was passing the small window She went down she called out to granny and she said mommy come here come here come out to the yard So they went they went out to the yard and granny said well, what are you looking for? She said I know this is sad this will sound, you know, not right, but I saw Bill I saw Bill at the window and he was smiling big wide smile on him and And granny said we can't we they knew that they couldn't because Bill was in America now the thing is that Bill was in the Air Force in America and It was only a couple of weeks later that they got the news through the letter that Bill had died He had been killed in battle and at the time that my mother saw him. He would have already been dead now that that Yeah, that really affected mum, but I think what's really about that and that's in the book as well But I think what's really not funny about that isn't it that he was smiling at her It's almost like if that does happen if that's true and the dead come back. It's almost a comfort us, isn't it? You know to say it's okay. Yes, and so he was he was smiling. He was smiling at her and she always remembers that That's amazing. Amazing indeed now your first novel and the trial of Lotta Ray It was set in London in the 1900s and this is set now in in Ireland Dublin is it at the at the beginning of the century as well? Have you a love for historical fiction Siobhan? Yeah, I've always loved history and always loved it It's like the biggest story ever told like to me I've always been fascinated about what happened where and when to get us to where we are now I'm fascinated by that chain of events, you know, I'm also fascinated by If if something hadn't happened where would we be now and it can be so simple if you think about like your own life Like we're all living a kind of story at the moment So your own life if you take the wrong turn Something happens that's different that if you take another turn, I'm always fascinated by all that I'm particularly interested in the turn of the 20th century history Probably because it's nearer my own time, but and my own grandparents were living then So I identify with it I know I have known the people that came from that time and we're young in that time But it because it was the time of great hope In in England and in Ireland because of course Britain were the rulers of Ireland then so a lot of what was happening There was happening here So you had all the big liberal welfare reforms. You had votes for women crying out for votes for women You had scientific advances and then the terrible big black doom of the first world war came and robbed all the dreams of a generation a butchered a generation basically and Took all their dreams and all their hope But the interesting thing is it also Changed the world to I made it start to become what we have today Because everybody then for instance, I'm not everybody knows that it wasn't just women that didn't have the vote It was the common man that didn't have the vote either It was actually only wealthy Landed men that were allowed to vote the common man was not allowed to vote it was only after the first world war that he got the vote and women got the vote and Then because they weren't they would not bow to authority in the same way anymore because they had learned that they couldn't trust authority Because authority had taken them into this terrible terrible war. So they didn't trust empire they didn't trust king and they didn't have country and So the whole world changed basically and I believe that you're you're in the process of planning a third book and Again, it's set at the beginning of the 20th century as well Yeah, so it's this one slightly later So it's after it's in Ireland obviously and it's in Ireland and it's at the end of the Civil War and It's in an island community off the West Coast of Ireland Who have there has been atrocities and a particular trustee committed during the war on the mainland and it's about players In that atrocity going back to the island and the the disturbances within the island community Due to that and what revenge or not might be taken and what what comes from that They're all really interesting Interesting topics so that the greatest is out now and I've asked Declan to send me a copy office So I'm looking forward actually to reading it and we have a Highland radio book club here as well So we might feature it some month night in the autumn when we get back to reading again So it's available in all good all good book shops. I presume and online as well Yes Everywhere you might get your books all the book shops basically and online so any anywhere that you'd normally get your books You should be able to get it there Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking time out and I hope that your journey ends safely for you And good luck with good luck with the greatest and good luck with your third novel as well So many thanks indeed for for taking time out tonight Thanks so much Jean it's a great talk to you and and and to you too It's the 50% off mega summer sale at right price tiles and wood flooring up to