Iria Seijas-Pérez, "Sapphic Adolescent Girls in Irish Young Adult Fiction: Queering Girlhood"(Routledge, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Helen Pannet
Guest: Iria Seijas-Pérez
Episode: "Sapphic Adolescent Girls in Irish Young Adult Fiction: Queering Girlhood" (Routledge, 2025)
Date: February 14, 2026

---

Overview

This episode features a deep-dive interview with Iria Seijas-Pérez about her recent monograph, Sapphic Adolescent Girls in Irish Young Adult Fiction: Queering Girlhood. The conversation explores the complexities of representing Sapphic (lesbian, bisexual, queer) adolescent girls in contemporary Irish YA (Young Adult) fiction, the intersections of sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and history, as well as the evolving landscape of Irish queer literature and its broader cultural implications.

---

Guest Introduction and Project Genesis

• Personal and Academic Journey ([01:32])
  • Iria describes how living in Ireland pre-pandemic and working as a language assistant informed her focus on Irish literature and queer/feminist studies ([01:32]).
  • The research draws heavily from her 2024 PhD thesis, with a shift in focus early on (within the first three months) from established Irish authors to contemporary YA Sapphic fiction.
  • Key moment of redirection occurred during a discussion with her supervisor, which led to a focus on YA novels by Irish women authors with explicitly queer protagonists.

Quote:

“My interest in Sapphic characters stems from my own identity. … So initially what the PhD was going to be… but it changed within the first three months, so that was great timing.” (A, [01:32])

---

Corpus Selection and Theoretical Framework

• Selection Criteria for Analyzed Texts ([09:42])
  • Focus on YA novels written in English (due to language proficiency), by women from or residing in the Republic of Ireland, with Sapphic protagonists aged 12–18, published after 2015.
  • Excludes texts set outside the Republic, fantasy novels, or those not explicitly addressing sexuality—even if not through romance or coming-out scenes.
  • The 2015 Irish marriage equality referendum is highlighted as a turning point inspiring a spike in LGBTQ YA publishing.

Quote:

“One of my arguments is that YA narratives about queer lives need not be reduced to the queerness of the story, you know.” (A, [11:18])

• Texts and Authors That "Got Away" ([14:25])
  • Some fantasy novels (e.g., Helen Corcoran’s Queen of Coin and Whispers) excluded due to setting/out-of-scope parameters.
  • Recent and forthcoming works by authors such as Caroline O’Donoghue and others noted as promising for future research.

---

Thematic Analysis of Key Chapters

1. Irish Catholic School Experience ([17:25])

• Analysis of three novels: Moïra Fowley-Doyle's All the Bad Apples, Claire Hennessy's Like Other Girls, Ciara Smyth's Not My Problem.
• Contrasts the range of school experiences for queer girls, from explicit homophobia and isolation to eventual support and finding community.
• Explores nuances: overt homophobia from peers/families, subtler institutional loneliness, and internalized prejudice.

Quote:

“Dina… is targeted by the homophobia of her peers, and not only her peers, but also her family… we have three very different experiences in Catholic schools in Ireland.” (A, [17:25])

“The last book gives us this… allows for the idea that not every queer themed novel has to focus on the repression of it. … All narratives are valid because the queer experience is extremely different.” (A, [25:26])

---

2. Family and Friendship Dynamics ([27:51])

• In many novels, “queerness” is present, but not the narrative focus—teens grapple with universal issues (family dynamics, mental health, friendships).
• Examples:
  • Not My Problem: Aideen copes with her mother's alcoholism and absent father.
  • The Falling in Love Montage: Saoirse handles her mom’s illness, her father’s new relationship, and the aftermath of a breakup.
  • Like Other Girls: Lauren’s experience with abortion foregrounds reproductive rights, pushing sexuality to a subplot.
• Highlights importance of fun, relatable, non-tragic queer stories.

Quote:

“It surprised me… many of these novels, the focus isn’t something completely different than the sexuality… your experiences are going to be defined by your sexuality… What they're really dealing with is all the typical issues that any teenager would struggle with.” (A, [27:51])

"It’s very important to have queer books that are just a fun read about the struggles of teenagehood." (A, [35:12])

---

3. Racialized Sapphic Girls: Adiba Jaigirdar’s Work ([36:35])

• Jaigirdar, a Bangladeshi-Irish author, foregrounds the intersection of race, sexuality, and diaspora.
• Her novels (The Henna Wars, Honey and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating, The Dos and Donuts of Love) allow nuanced exploration of belonging, racism, community, and the negotiation of multiple identities.
• Only apparent author providing ongoing representation of racialized Sapphic girls in Ireland—raises questions about publishing and inclusion.
• The analysis distinguishes between “identity struggles” (diaspora, parental expectations, pressures to succeed) and queerness; both are presented as fundamental, interconnected, but not reductive.

Quote:

"They must negotiate that; this sort of dichotomy of ‘I don’t fully belong here because I’m constantly reminded that I don’t belong here’… but I cannot possibly live in Bangladesh if I want to be my real self, which is a queer, racialized girl.” (A, [39:38])

“I feel like Jaigirdar really brings that into her work… the complexity of someone's identity. The sentence ‘I contain multitudes’ is… true.” (A, [44:55])

---

4. Sapphic Sexuality and Witchcraft ([47:11])

• Focus on Deirdre Sullivan's Perfectly Preventable Deaths and related works.
• Explores the cultural/fictional linkage of queerness and witchcraft as subversive, dissident identities.
• Contrasts the acceptance of Catholic ritual (prayers, altars) vs. suspicion and ostracization of magical practice—both as means of seeking comfort/control.
• The “queer witch” is framed as both outsider and ultimate savior against oppressive, even religious, forces.

Quote:

“Witches and queer people have long been connected as dissident, subversive identities… both fit within those parameters.”
“...Madeleine is the one who does the quirky, magical things, but she's the one saving the day at the end, and religion… turns out to be evil.” (A, [47:11]; [51:20])

---

5. Haunted by History: The Gothic, Magical Realism, and Ireland’s Past ([54:30])

• Many Irish YA novels process the legacy of institutional violence against women (Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene Laundries) through Gothic and magical realist genres.
• Fictionalizing trauma allows young readers (often unfamiliar with this history) to access and process dark national legacies at a safe remove.
• Characters are haunted—literally and metaphorically—by suppressions, secrets, and inherited trauma, especially Sapphic women and girls.
• Emphasizes the necessity of foregrounding these stories for awareness and collective reckoning.

Quote:

“Supernatural narratives… make it easier to address hard realities… the experiences of the new generations are marked, are defined by the experiences of the previous generations that never dealt or that were subjected to terrible acts of violence…” (A, [54:30])

“They’re books that I’ll never be tired to recommend.” (A, [65:49])

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the proliferation and dynamism of Irish Sapphic YA:

  “I feel like it’s thriving in a sense, 100%.” (A, [16:13])

• On the need for non-tragic queer stories:

  “At the beginning when queer YA novels began to be published, they were tragic. They were absolutely tragic. And this is just a fun queer read…” (A, [32:59])

• On inclusion and future research:

  “There are like, publications that I did not include… but because they were not published at the time that I was already done writing the chapters. … I’m definitely interested in working with their text in the future.” (A, [14:25])

---

Looking Ahead: Current and Future Work ([66:20])

• Iria is busy with teaching, but has upcoming publications:
  • A chapter on Irish ethnic minority writing (including Adiba Jaigirdar and Zainab Boladali).
  • An article on Sapphic terminology in Irish YA, in collaboration with a linguist.
  • A special journal issue on girlhood studies.
  • Plans to continue research and expand to new authors/works as the field grows.

---

Recommended Reading List

Throughout the episode, the following novels and authors are discussed and recommended for further reading:

• All the Bad Apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle
• Like Other Girls by Claire Hennessy
• Not My Problem and The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth
• The Henna Wars, Honey and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating, The Do's and Donuts of Love by Adiba Jaigirdar
• Perfectly Preventable Deaths and Precious Catastrophe by Deirdre Sullivan
• Other Words for Smoke by Sarah Maria Griffin

---

Conclusion

This in-depth conversation offers listeners both a state-of-the-field overview and a nuanced, passionate analysis of how Irish YA fiction is queering girlhood—challenging norms, commemorating history, and offering both complex and joyful representations. For newcomers to queer Irish YA, the episode serves as a lively, informative gateway and provides ample suggestions for building a TBR (“to be read”) list bridging literature, history, identity, and imagination.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Good morning and welcome to New Books in Irish Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. My name is Helen Pannet and I'm one of the co hosts of the channel today. I'm delighted to be talking to Iria Cejas Perez, who has a PhD in Advanced English Studies from the University of Vigo. She's a member of the research project Communitas Relational Ontologies in Atlantic Anglophone cultures of the 21st century and a member of the Centre for Irish Studies in Casseris. She also collaborates with the research group Feminario di Investigacion Feminismos Irresistencias. I apologize for that pronunciation. She's participated in numerous conferences, both national and international, and she's also published several articles and book chapters. Her research interests include YA literature, Irish literature, feminist studies, and queer studies, and she's currently a substitute lecturer at at the University of Extremadura. I'm delighted to be talking to her today about her most recent publication, which is the monograph Sapphic Adolescent Girls in Irish Young Adult Queering Girlhood, which came out in the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature series just in November of last year. 2025. Iria, thank you so much for joining me today. I wonder if you'd begin the interview just by saying a few words about yourself and how you became interest in the subject and what brought you to write this book.

[A]

Okay, so I mean, I don't know what to say about myself, particularly other than the introduction you've done, but basically I am a researcher of Y literature based in Spain and well, the idea for the book came from my PhD thesis that I completed in 2024 and I began this PhD in 2020. Initially it was a sort of different topic, but it still has it had some aspects in common with what it turned out to be in the end. Right before starting my PhD, I was living in Ireland. I was working as a language assistant in secondary school in Limerick and then the pandemic hit and my time as a language assistant got short and I was very upset and annoyed about because I was having a great time at the school, to be honest. I had previously lived in Ireland. I did my living search in County West Smith and I was sure I wanted to work with Irish literature because obviously I was familiar with the context and it felt like in that way it will keep the connection with Ireland going in a sense. And I don't know, the same way that I was very clear about Ireland, I was very clear that I wanted to work with female authors because in the last decades, efforts have been made by feminist scholars to bring women's writers to the center stage, let's say, to bring into the canon of the literary canon. So I felt like as a feminist scholar it was my duty to contribute to this in a sense. And then also my interest in Sapphic characters stems from my own identity. Basically. There is not much to it other than that. So initially what the PhD was going to be was it was going to focus on authors such as Kate o', Brien, Emma Donoghue, Mary Dorsey and others that I never got to decide before the idea changed. And luckily, I say luckily because I've heard of people who changed their Ph.D. like focus, like when they have like advanced quite a lot. And that must be terrible to be fair. So luckily I changed it within the first three months of the starting. So that was great, great timing. And it was mainly because I was having a conversation with my supervisor, Professor Belemartin Lucas, and we were discussing the approach that I should take because both Kate o' Brien and Emma Donoghue, they have been proly studied. Mary Dorsey as well, even if to a lesser extent. So the question was what innovative research, what innovative analysis would I bring into the field of Irish studies within these particular authors? So she suggested that maybe I could contrast the work of these authors with maybe more recent works, more contemporary novels. And at that time I was reading one of the novels that I analyze in my in the book as well as bhd, which is Adiba Jai Guerdaris, the Hannah wars only because I had come across it on the Internet. I say queer people will relate to this. When you go online, you say, and you research queer books, queer fiction books for ya, queer books and that apps. I was reading it and I mentioned it and I said, this is ya. It's not adult fiction, but it's Sapphic fiction by, in this case Bangladesh, Bangladeshi Irish author possessed in Ireland and all of that. And she suggested that maybe I could focus on ya. So obviously I had to do the research first to check if there were enough YA books like by Irish authors and sesh in Ireland that I could use. Because if there were not enough, maybe that would be a bit complicated. And to be fair, when we think of YA written in English, so from the Anglophone world, we tend to think of British and American text. So obviously I had no idea if this was a potential idea that could be carried out. But it turned out that yes, and basically that's how it came out then obviously the book has seen some changes from the PhD dissertation, mainly because of the space limitations, to be fair, because the extension of the dissertation is much longer than the extension for the book. But I actually like this. I mean, it was more work to be done, in a sense. But I did change some analysis around a bit. Like the focus of the chapter is in the first chapter, for example, of the book. The novels that I analyze are not exactly the novels that I analyze in the first. Well, yes, in the first chapter of analysis in the district dissertation. And also I included a new book that I had not included in the dissertation because by the time I was. I had written the chapter where it was going to, like where it could fit into the analysis. The book came out after I wrote that, so obviously I could not include it, but I took the chapter.

[B]

Which book was that?

[A]

The Do's and Donuts of Love. I have a chapter in my dissertation dedicated to her novels. But when I finished, like the Do's and Don'ts of Love came out after I had finished writing the chapter. So I was like, look, we'll leave it out for this, but I'll include it in the book. And so that gave me the opportunity to look at a new perspective as well from the analysis of that novel. So that was great. I mean, it was more work, as I said, but it was an opportunity as well to broaden my research, so. Oh, gosh, for sure, for sure.

[B]

That's fantastic. That's a really interesting journey from sort of the initial project through to the PhD through to the book. And it sort of answers some of the questions that I was going to ask you about, in particular about schools and so on. It's interesting because I get the impression that Deepaj Idea Girls work is one of the most well known outside of Ireland. So doesn't surprise me that it came up in your Google search.

[A]

Yeah, no, absolutely. And lately I think she, I mean, she's absolutely prolific in the last. I feel like in comparison to her in the. She. Because she published her debut novel in 2020, which is when I started my PhD, and since then she's written like six. And it's like, what have I done in these six years? But yeah, so. And I feel like she, she's very present in social media as well. So she, she has this ability to reach a very wide audience and I've seen her books coming up in many web pages that recommend LGBT books. And she's recently published. She's recently published a middle grade novel.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

12 to 14 years old. And she's publishing her first Adult novel in March. Oh, interesting. So she hasn't stopped.

[B]

She really hasn't. Yeah. No, no. And, well, we'll come back to her work when we talk about it in relation to your chap. So let's jump into discussing the book itself. In the introduction, you set out the corpus of texts that you deal with and how you chose those texts and your theoretical framework. Can you talk us through this a little bit? I'm always curious to know if there are any texts that got away and that you would have liked to include and just didn't quite fit in with the parameters you'd set yourself.

[A]

Yeah, I think there are always books that get away in a sense, because there is only so much space and so much that you can write about. So in terms of the criteria that I use to select the novels for the analysis, like the corpus of study, once the research topic was decided, which as I mentioned, took about three months, my next step was to select this corpus of study. And I wanted it to be diverse in order to sort of provide various perspectives and offer broader results about my analysis of Sapphic identity in Ireland in YA novels. So obviously, the first criteria that I established was that because I do not speak Irish, more than three basics I needed to focus on works reason in English. And I've clarified, I think I clarified in the book as well, clarify in the dissertation that there are white books written in Irish and it's important to acknowledge them and to recognize them and recognize their worth and their value. But I couldn't include them because I'm not able to read them. But I feel like it's important to mention is that there is a broad variety of books for adolescents in the Irish language. So I began by reading any contemporary novels, regardless of the genre, that I could find that were written by a woman either from or resident in the island of Ireland. So comprising both the Republic and Northern Ireland, they had to have a lesbian, bisexual or queer female protagonist, and they had to be targeted as a young adult audience. So after this preliminary reading, I realized that I really needed to narrow my criteria in an attempt to build a sort of coherent analysis that could examine those similarities and differences between the novels. So my first decision was to reduce my corpus exclusively to the novels that were set in the Republic of Ireland, whether fictional or a real town. And I subsequently chose to focus on novels written by women authors from and or residing in the Republic of Ireland. And this decision was prompted by two reasons that are interconnected. First, as I explore the like, if you are exploring the representation of queer people within the Irish session, it is necessary to pay attention to the social context. So the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are, as of now, two separate states whose LGBTQ communities are subjected to two different experiences that are marked by the different legislations that exist in each of these nations. So that matter in the sense of doing the analysis of the novel. And also, while the Republic of Ireland legalized same sex marriage in 2015, this did not happen in Northern Ireland until 2020. So that is also a difference. So this led me to focus on novels that were published after 2015, because the same sex marriage referendum sort of act as a catalyst factor in the publication of LGBTQ Irish Y novels. After the same sex marriage referendum, there began to be a sort of increase in YA queer publications. So other criteria that I established in order to sort of reduce the corpus of the story was that the main characters had to be aged between 12 and 18 and that their sexuality had to be explicitly addressed, but not necessarily through a romantic relationship or a coming out a scene. And I felt that this was very important because one of my arguments is that y narratives about queer lives need not be reduced to the queerness of this story, you know. And so these two parameters allow me to observe how characters that attended secondary schools approach their lesbianism, bisexuality, queerness in a variety of forms and within predominantly heteronormative institutions. So, of course, these criteria imply that no fantasy novels would be included in the corpus. And for example, I would have loved to work with Helen Corcoran's Queen of Coins and Whispers and its sequel, Daughter of Winter and Twilight. Yes, and I would have loved that because I've read the novels and I've enjoyed them very much. But because I needed them to be set in Ireland for the purpose of of the analysis, I had to exclude them. And these are two books that I highly recommend for those who like fantasy, to be fair. And also what happened is that many books were published as I was carrying out my research. So there are like, publications that I did not include, but because they were not published at the time that I was, that I was already done writing. Writing the chapters. Yes. And so on. For example, works by Amy Claire King, Zainab Boladali Cleric Magai and Caroline o', Donohue, just to mention a few. I would love to work with that. And I'm definitely interested in working with their text in the future. And that's something that I would like to definitely include in my research. For example, Caroline o' Donaghy's novels which deal with. They also deal with queer lives. So I think that fits perfectly within my research. And they have this sort of magical realist component to them, the bit of the supernatural going on, which I do explore a bit in the book.

[B]

But.

[A]

I will look into these novels as well at some point, I think.

[B]

Future projects.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

It's the joy and the difficulty of working with very contemporary texts, isn't it? It's just that they just keep coming.

[A]

Exactly, yes. And it's impossible to include everything because once you find out about a book, maybe you're very recent, your chapter or your article or your book, and you're like, oh, I would have loved to include that, but honestly, there's no space. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, like, it.

[B]

Just means it's a really a rich area for continued research.

[A]

Yeah, no, no, absolutely, absolutely. It's. I, I feel like it's thriving in a sense, 100%.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. So you, you start off with. What I found is a really useful first chapter, which I was interested when you mentioned sort of discovering IR Sapphic literature and having been aware of a sort of a more British and American context. And so what you do is you sort of situate Irish YA LGBTQ literature within a more international context, which is obviously huge and vast. I think we'll maybe not touch on that, particularly now, and read as if the book can discover that so that we can move on to sort of your work, specifically on the novels that we've spoken about. So your, what is your second chapter then is on the common experience of all teenagers and within the Irish context for teenage girls, the heteronormativity of the all girls Irish Catholic school, which you obviously have experience of both as a pupil and as a teaching assistant. And the three novels that you discuss in the chapter tell us quite a lot about that experience. What do they tell us?

[A]

So I feel like I included three novels in that chapter. I believe it was Moira Vollyroy's All About Apples, Claire Hennessy's Like Other Girls, and Kira Smith's Not My Problem. And I feel like the three of them give us a very different insight into the Catholic school experience in Ireland. So I felt like it was important to write this chapter because in the case of primary school, primary schools, most of them are Catholic. And in the case of secondary schools, I think it's a bit about half and half at this point. Maybe 49% are non denominational and 51% are Catholic. So any queer person in Ireland, any queer teenager in Ireland is likely to have either go through a Catholic school or have contact with a Catholic school. So in this chapter we see that we have three very different experiences. In the case of Dina, in all the bad apples, she's targeted by the homophobia of her peers, and not only her peers, but also her family, because we see that her father encourages this sort of regime, this sort of system. That's why Tina goes to that school to enforce this sort of Catholic education and Catholic values of repression of sexuality and obviously of homophobic values and ideas, in a sense, because when Dina comes out, she comes out to her older sister and by mistake her father hears her and he's outraged, obviously, because of the whole context of the story, which I don't want to escape, spoil the people who read the book, which is really, really good. But he was visiting the, the two. Well, his, his daughter is. Because he had heard that there had been protests at the Parent Teacher Association, I think, from the school, about a workshop that was being organized by an LGBTQ plus the society or organization charity. And so he was enraged by that because I think one of the. I don't remember the quote exactly, but he was outraged, saying, like, what sort of things are they teaching you at this school? So that's the image we have of Dina's school that is a very, very repressive, very, very homophobic. And we see this through her interactions with her peers. It's true that the parts, the scenes sort of that take place within the school are only at the beginning and at the very end of the, of the book. They're not the main story. But we do see how, for example, she's one of the characters that goes to an all girls Catholic school. And the girls in her class, they do a sort of survey in the blackboard saying that. Is Dina Reese a lesbian? Yes. No. She's too ugly to get a boy or something like that. So you see how homophobia is inherent in this bullying. And Dina does mention that there are other queer girls in her school that are protesting that the school wants to cancel the workshop from the LGBT Q organization. What she feels at first, she first unable to join them. She doesn't want to put a target on her back. And even though she has not said that she's a lesbian at the time, she's already being targeted. So that says a lot about the experience. And that experience is common to Irish schools. I contrast my analysis of the novel with reports from belong to Youth Services, which is the LGBTQ association in Ireland for young people. And these Surveys do reveal that there is still homophobia present within the secondary schools, in some cases from other students, in some cases from the teachers, and in some cases from the institution at large. So it's a very complicated thing. And I feel like the novel does explore this. And at the end it's true that Dina is able to sort of challenge these attitudes and she embraces her identity and she probably wears a pin, a badge, saying that she's a lesbian to school and she joins the other girls in your protest and so on. But I feel like it's important to reflect on the first scenes and it's good for teenagers to read about that. And then in the case of Lauren, for example, we have again, an old girls Catholic school. Lauren is a protagonist from Like Other Girls by Laura Hennessy. And in this case, the religious dogma of this school is more connected to her abortion and how she feels. But there is a sort of. There is also the importance of her position in the school as what she believes to be the only queer girl besides her best friend who is transitioning. And she feels very, very lonely also. And I feel like this is important because Lauren thinks that she assumes that no one else is queer and because she's very prejudiced towards the other girls. That is true, and that is something important that the book explores. But in this case, we see how schools can become a lonely place for queer people. Because if your school does not allow you to embrace your identity, you're not gonna share that with your peers. And so you're going to feel lonely. And everyone else who is also in that position is going to feel lonely and you're not going to be able to find a community. And that's what happens to Lauren at the beginning of the book. She's not able to find a queer community. But ba she does. She realizes that there are queer girls in her school and all that. But at first you see that the queer experience in a repressive school can get very, very lonely. And that's also something that was reflected in the report Divorce. So this is a situation that is still very present in Ireland. And the book explores that and explores the importance of finding community. And then we have the school in Not My problem, we have 18. And in this case, while there is no specific mention of religion, you can see it everywhere. I mean, I don't know if this is because for someone, maybe for a reader who's not familiar with Catholicism or with the Irish context, it might be a bit harder, but I felt like the presence of religion was lurking throughout the book. We don't know if Aydin is out in general to her family, to her mom and, well, her dad. We assume she's not because it's a case of father abandonment. But in the school, she's out because she was outish. And she mentions that at first she had a really bad time, and then other people started to come out and everything was great. So she's a bit annoyed about that. And I think that's very fair. She had to take the hard part of that. And then everyone was cool, pretending that nothing had ever happened and that she had not been sort of maybe not bullied, harassed to a certain point for being a lesbian. And then we have, like. We do have the Catholic context, as in the Norse in the school is actually a nun. The school had been a convent previously or something to do, like a religious institution, but I believe it was a convent. She does have these expressions that she suddenly says, I said hail Mary, or Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. And I feel like those sort of things you only do if you've been raised within a Catholic background, that you might not identify with the Catholic values, but you're gonna go back to that at some point because it's what you know. And you're going to sort of send the prayer out when you're nervous and you're going to talk about the saints and all that, just because it's part of you. And we see that. But I think it's good that the book does not focus only on that. As in, yes, Aideen most likely comes from a Catholic background, but she's able to be herself in school once everyone seems to have calmed down a bit and everyone, like, more people, has come out. So I think that gives us a different perspective from the other two novels in which we have Dina, who's clearly being bullish because she's a lesbian. We have Lauren, who's feeling lonely at the beginning because she's unable to find a community, partly because she does not allow herself and partly because of the school's repressive sort of atmosphere. And then we have a teen who we say, okay, she's definitely. She's definitely coming from a Catholic background, but that is not what matters. And we see her that she has her own queer community within the school. She becomes friends with the other queer girls and so on. So I feel like it's important to have the different perspectives. And the last book gives us this. It allows for the idea that not every queer novel, queer themed novel, has to focus on the repression of it, on the complexity of it. And I think that's also what all of them are valid. Obviously, all narratives are valid because the queer experience is extremely different. But I think it's great that there are books that are not putting the focus on that.

[B]

Yeah, the full spectrum. Yeah. And you carry on, and you mentioned it at the beginning and you mentioned it again. It's not always got to be the focus. And that's what happens in your next chapter, where you again refer to the fact that the girl's sexuality isn't the sole focus in the novels. It is part and parcel of their interactions and relationships. And here you focus on relationships with family and friends. So what are some of the issues that the characters have to deal with in this respect? And how do the novels tackle that?

[A]

So I think it surprised me in a sense that many of these novels, the focus isn't something completely different than the sexuality. I mean, the sexuality is part of the narrative because as a queer person within a. Within a heteronorm, within heteronormative society, your experiences are going to be defined by your sexuality, clearly, like there's no other choice. So I think it's good that they are exploring other. Other things, as in, yes, this is part of my experience and it's going to affect me. What I am dealing with many other things. And what they're really dealing with in some cases is very. All the typical issues that any teenager would struggle with at that time in their life to do with family and friendships. So I feel like this helps broaden the scope of the novels and the interest that it can have for very different audiences. So in the case of Aideen, for example, she mostly deals with her mother's alcoholism. She has to take sort of over the role of the care of the family. And it's. I feel like it's a very complex narrative. And at some point, as a reader, you can agree with Aideen's decisions and her attitude. But at other points, especially if you read it as an adult, you're going to disagree. But what you get out of this is that it's a very complex situation that she's dealing with. Her father had an affair. He had a previous marriage and had affair with Aideen's mother and then just abandoned them and went back to the other family. And he barely visits. And when he visits, her mom struggles a lot with that. And she goes on and spirals and goes back to alcohol and cannot care for Aideen, as also Aideen is the One in charge of that and she's really embarrassed and she blames her mom because she's unable to blame her father. She does not have the tools. She does not understand to a certain point why this is happening. So obviously you take out your frustration on the parent that is there for you, not on the parent that abandons you. So that is something that we see in the novel. Not my problem. Which really I feel like Ciara Smith does a great job on bringing the focus into other things other than the sexuality. Like, yes, I have lesbian characters as protagonists, but I'm going to tell other experiences that they have. Obviously sexuality is going to be present because, for example, if we do have a romantic storyline, even if it's part of the sort of the subplot, obviously it's going to be a Sapphic romantic storyline and that's going to affect its development within her journal society. But the focus is never that. It's all the other things that are going on. And I feel that's great and that it makes reading about Sapphic and queer lives more complex and more interesting and more significant as well, in a way. In this chapter I included her other novel. Cannot think of the title now because I'm thinking of the Spanish translation I Fall in Love Montage. Because the Spanish translation has nothing to do with that. Sorry. The Falling in Love montage was actually her debut novel. In this case we have Saoirse, who's struggling with her mother's early onset dementia and her father's new relationship and just the, the. The complexity of finishing secondary school and not knowing what you want to do. She's just on her livingster, so she's just trying to get through the summer and she meets this girl and she's made herself the rule that she's not gonna date any girl, so she's not gonna make out with any lesbian or bisexual girls so that she avoids the possibility of the relationship. It's a bit, I don't know, it's a bit crazy to think that, but it's a very teenage thing to do, I feel. It's very teenage reasoning. So it's very fun. I think it's a very fun read and we need fun reads as part of the queer community. Because at the beginning when queer YA novels began to be published, they were tragic. They were absolutely tragic. And this is just a fun quiz read about romcoms and imitating romcoms through dates. And so she begins to sort of date this girl in a sense, but only for the summer, believing that that is a loophole in her book of rules about not dating. But at the same time, she's dealing with her father's new relationship, because when her mother was diagnosed with early onset dementia, her parents decided to split. It was actually the mother's decision. And her mother is living in a home where they are able to take care of her. And her father, obviously, he's moved on. He has a new relationship. And Sergio struggles with that because she feels that because it's an illness that can be hereditary, she feels, okay, so what if I get it too? Will my father abandon me? But in a very Irish session of not dealing with the things that we struggle with, she's unable to talk about this with her dad. So she's just dealing with that on her own. And that's frustrating her. And that obviously affects her relationships with friends and with her. Her new sort of love interest. Girl she's dating. And she's in a fight with her best friend because she's also broken out with her girlfriend. Well, her girlfriend has broken up with her. That's why she made out the rule not to date. And she was best friends before dating this girl. She was best friends with her and with another girl. And when the girlfriend breaks out with her, she gets mad at the best friend because she knew and didn't tell her. So that is also very teenage. So it's great because this is just a very teenage read about teenage lives. And yes, she's a lesbian, and yes, it's all about dating girls and having girlfriends and so on, but it's the common teenage experience in a sense. So I feel like that's very, very important. As I mentioned, it's very important to have queer books that are just a fan read about the struggles of teenagehood. Yeah. And then we have Lauren in, like other girls, who's dealing with the abortion. And I like that because it gave me the idea. It gave me not the idea, but the possibility of researching about reproductive rights in Ireland, which has been a whole struggle and very significant. And so that's the main theme of the novel. And I feel like it's very, very important to have a novel for young teens about abortion in Ireland and the history of reproductive rights in Ireland and the consequences of prohibition of abortion. And yes, it's a very sexual protagonist. And obviously we have the subplot about Lauren's trying. Lauren trying to find a community, her experiences in Q Club and how she gets mad at all her friends because she's struggling with the abortion. Same with the family because she's unable to tell them. But the main thing is the abortion. That's the issue in the book. It's not her sexuality. So I feel like that's, that's. That's very, very important. I have not been able to find many, many books about abortion in Ireland. To be fair, I found some. I think I found one in Northern Ireland, very published very recently. And this was. This was published in, in 2017. So it was still illegal. Exactly. And that's, that's very, very good that we have a book about that, about the realities of reproductive right. In Ireland. And yes, the protagonist is bisexual and we do have the subplot, but the main thing is to learn about the. The consequences of abortion. Yeah.

[B]

So the whole chapter deals with the fact that family and relationships and friendships are teenage issues and they're lived similarly by everybody. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. You move on then in your next chapter to zoom in on Adiba Jaidirgarh, who we mentioned at the beginning, prolific writer. And you discuss in this chapter racialized Sapphic Adolescents Girls. I imagine many of our listeners won't necessarily be familiar with Jaidirgarh's work. Can you maybe start just by telling us a little bit about it and how you analyzed it in this chapter?

[A]

Yes. So Adiba Deirgidar, her novels focus, I think, pretty much always on Sapphic characters, Sapphic racialized characters specifically. And she does have a historical novel set in the Titanic, I believe it was. Yeah. But all the other ones are sort of contemporary, either set in Ireland or the. The uk and so Decader was sort of the author that started the whole thing. Very thankful to her writing, to be honest, because I was, as I mentioned, I was reading the Hannah wars when I decided to change my idea into focusing on YA novels. And I discovered the wide world of Irish ya. So she is Bangladeshi Irish. And as I mentioned, she's very, very prolific. In the last six years, I think she's published six novels. So I feel like that's fantastic and it's given me a lot to research. So thank you for that as well. And so her. I think it's important to mention that I do have two chapters that focus on her. So that's great. But it's also because of the reason that she's the only writer that I was able to find that writes racialized Sapphic characters in Ireland, which gives us a space to think about what does this mean for the Irish context, which is a very multicultural context? What does it mean? Why are there no more writers writing racialized Sapphic characters in Ireland. Are we not giving them the space for it, the opportunity for it? So I feel like that's important to mention, but obviously it works great for the analysis of. For this one and the second, the next one that is also. It also focuses on her novels. So in this first chapter I wanted to focus on sort of the identity of the characters beyond your sexuality, which I left for the following chapter. So I focus on their experiences as part of a diaspora, their experiences of racism, homophobia as well in connection to this religion, pressuring studies, all those experiences that I was able to identify as I read the novels. So in the case of Diaspora, I felt like it was important to situate the girls, the protagonists, within their context. And it is a diasporic context because yes, they go to Irish schools, Irish all girls, Catholic schools, I think, in most cases. And yes, they do have Irish friends, obviously, but they also have the context of their families and the wider Bangladeshi and or Bengali communities. So we see them going to typical celebrations of this community, like dawads and so on, and we see them interacting in these communities. And what really stood out for me, just. Just to focus on an example for. Just because I cannot talk about everything, obviously. Sure, sure. There is a scene in which we have. In Honey and Isha's Guide to Fake Dating, which is a book I really, really enjoyed. Also another very fun read. Hani has to. Her two best friends are white Irish. We sort of assume that from a Catholic background. And then they ask her why can't they never go to their. To their Bengali celebrations? And Honey is. I. I don't want to say that it's because it's a space for us, but it's really just because of that. It's because of space for us. And so we see her negotiating all of that and the negotiation of the identity is something that the characters really struggle with at different points. Also because of their sexuality, which I can't keep mentioning this forever, is not going to be the focus of the novels, but is going to affect, obviously, because your identity and how you navigate the world, it's conditioned by that in a way. We see, for example, in the Henna wars that Nishas and also Shirin in the Do's and Don'ts of Love, both of them, they don't consider living in Bangladesh because they're queer and they know that's not a possibility to be openly queer in there. And so they keep the connection, obviously with their families and the community and they identify as Bangladeshi, but they are aware of that, and they must negotiate that. And it's this sort of dichotomy of I don't fully belong here because I'm constantly reminded that I don't belong here. For example, in the case of Shirin, she participates in a TV reality program called the Irish Junior Baking Show. And we see how she becomes target of online abuse. The people criticizing her presence in an Irish TV reality program because she's not Irish, by the standards of people who watch this and hide their identity online because it's always really easy to criticize while hiding who you are. And so she's like, they're telling me I don't belong here, but I was born here. And I can also. I can. I identify as Irish and I identify as Bangladeshi, but I. I cannot possibly live in Bangladesh if I want to be my real self, which is a queer, racialized girl. And so we see these, that these are things that they must negotiate with and they must deal with besides their sexuality, even though the sexuality is always going to be present in that sense. And we have, for example, I found it very interesting the way the novels mentioned the pressure in studies, which is a stereotype that we typically associate with Asian people and Asian communities. And the novels deal with this idea of your parents migrated to have a better life, so you need to show them that you are achieving this better life. In the case of Honey and Ishu's Guide to Fate Dating, we see this through the character of Ishu, but it's present in the three novels because we see Isshu trying to get the best possible points in the leaving search to study medicine, even if she's not sure that she wants to study medicine. But is this idea of, to succeed, you must study medicine, but I feel like that's present in every country. And then we have Shirin, who wants to win the reality show to help her parents with their donut shop. So in a way, she's also feeling this pressure to succeed. So. And then in the Hannah Wars, Nishat also mentions that she feels that through her coming out, she's disappointed her parents and she's getting her junior cert results. I think it is not believing the unearth results. And their parents make sort of a comment and she feels like they don't believe any more than she can get a good result in the junior cert because she's a lesbian. So everything is gambash. So we see how they must deal with these things, both in connection to their sexuality, but also in connection to the many other aspects of Their identities, whether their ethnicity, their religion and so on. And then obviously we do have. In the second chapter of Ava Denudar in the book, I do. I do focus on sexuality because obviously it's something that needs its own space for analysis because it's very rogue. And obviously we have to situate it both within the Irish context, but also within the South Asian context. And I really enjoy analyzing these books. And I read basically everything that I get published. It doesn't stop publishing. So I always have something first to read. But I think that is great that she brings this, because we have to. We have to always think of the. What's the word? The interlocking of our identities. And when someone is Sapphic or queer, they're always going to have. Yes, sexuality, like defining their identity to a certain extent. But there's much more to that. And I feel that Jaigir really brings that into her work. And it's very satisfying to read. In a sense. It's very gauche that this is being published. The variety, the complexity of someone's identity. I feel like the sentence I contain multitudes is very Internet sort of thing, but it's true. We do contain multitudes and we should never be reduced to one part of. To just one part of our identity that pieces people off. So I. I feel like she does reach this objective within her books and she always be. And she also visibilizes the racialized identities in Ireland, which I find is a key thing in today's literature, especially with all these. The growing of. Of racism and all that that's been experienced in Ireland. It's very, very necessary to have young people and adult people reading about the multiculturality of Ireland.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely something that her work is doing a lot towards. Absolutely. And I agree with everything that you've just said. Moving on to something completely different, which is what you do in your next chapter, which I was thrilled to read because I'd been really struck when I read. I think it was perfectly Preventable deaths with the girl who has this odd relationship with water. And she's asked, who are you? And she says, I'm a lesbian. And it's this connection. It's such a funny section. It's the connection between witchcraft and Sapphic sexuality. And I'd been really struck by this, so I thought it was really interesting. And I loved how you took apart this link in this chapter. So what did you find? What are the links between Sapphic sexuality and witchcraft in these novels?

[A]

Well, first, I like to say that I Had a blast writing the answer. It's very. It's very. I don't know, it felt very fun to find this connection. I mean, witches and queer people have long been connected as dissident, subversive identities that stray away from the norm that we've imposed in society. Both witches and queer people fit within those parameters. So there's always been a connection there. So when I was reading the novels that I analyzed in this chapter, I felt like I had to mention, I had to explore. There's clearly a connection here. And it's being stated. It's not simply like, okay, they're sort of delving into this because there's been a lot of. Not theorization, but studies and so on and comments that, yes, the witchcraft and groanedness are connected, but it's definitely present. And I think it's present in A proposal on purpose. So I feel like, okay, I do have to talk about this. And in this particular novels, we see that the witches are both queer in their witchcraft and in their sexuality. So we see that they are cast out, they are rejected, they are feared not only because of their magic, their magical abilities and the magic that they perform and so on, but also because of their identity, their Sapphic identity. I'd say, for me, the most. The most. The most interesting example is in Perfectly Preventable Deaths and also the Cycle Will Precious Catastrophe we see. But especially in Perfectly Preventable Deaths, which I think is the one I focused on. In this chapter, we see Madeleine. And Madeleine has a twin sister who is sort of obsessed with religious paraphernalia. Catelyn. And Caitlin has her own altar of the Virgin Mary. She has all these little statues and she prays and so on. And no one mentions anything about this Grant. I suppose this is very common to know. Well, then their man, for example, she's unable to cope with Madlyn's quirkiness, in a sense, the way, for example, she puts salt around the bed for protection and so on. She criticizes this. She struggles with this. She tells her to please stop doing those things because she worries. But she doesn't worry about Caitlin praying and her massive Virgin Mary altar and her obsession with the church, which gets worse in the second novel, obviously, because she's gone through a very traumatic experience. But in the first book, it's already there. And so we see this biased sort of criteria towards between religion and any other sort of. I don't know, because in a sense, when you, like, through religion, you are performing certain rituals to feel calm, to feel better, to feel at Ease. And that is also what Madeline is doing. So in that sense, we see that. Okay, so why is one accepted and the other one isn't? Really the two twins, they are doing the same thing. Caitlin finds that calm that is in her Virgin Mary altar, in going to church, in praying. And Catelyn, not Caitlyn, sorry. And Muslin finds that peace with herself, let's say that calmness when she does the. When she gets the plants and she puts the salt and so on. But one is heavily criticized and the other isn't. So I felt that that was a very interesting thing that Deirdre Sullivan was pointing at, or maybe she wasn't, and I just read it that way.

[B]

No, no, I bet.

[A]

But that's definitely how high. Reddish. And it's also a connection. Obviously, we do go back to the sexuality because we have Madeleine, who's a lesbian, and Caitlin, who is. Who's a strange. So obviously I cannot read that into the analysis of why is religion accepted and why is any other form of not even ritual, which is not that she's performing a ritual, but any other actions condemned, you know, and then it's funny because I feel like also Deirdre Sullivan is playing with this. Like, it turns out that Mazeline is the one who ends up saving the. The sister from all the bad supernatural things going on in the village. And Catelyn is the one who keeps throwing herself about situations. And so we see how. I think Sullivan is sort of positioning Mageline as, okay, she's rejected because she's lesbian and she's the one who does the quirky, magical things, but she's the one saving the day at the end, and religion and devotion to the statues and all of that, that's what turns out to be evil. So I feel like in Sullivan's novels there's a subtext to the ills of society, the ills of a patriarchal, heteronormative society. And we see that through these interactions and through these ideas. We do have Catelyn with her religious obsession and we have Magdalene with her magical obsession. And so we think, okay, we know Catholicism, we know religion, we know the Church, so we trust in that. But it turns out to be the bad and the thing that we distrust because it's unfamiliar, because it's weird, because it's queer. That's the thing that's good in the end. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

So well done there. And I love the books that you deal with in that chapter. So we're arriving at your final chapter, which, again, really sort of spoke to me and spoke to things that I picked up on in so many Irish YA novels because they're so willing to take on the past and the recent past, but still the sort of secrets, the shames, all of the things that were imposed on vulnerable people, in particular women, in particular Sapphic women. And I'd been really interested in how all of the. Well, most of the authors and all of the target readers of these texts were born long after the Mother and baby Homes and the Magdalene Laundries, et cetera, closed. And yet it keeps coming back. And so the way you dealt with it as a haunting, I thought that was such an interesting take on it. So you discussed them as how these authors use the genres of magic realism and the gothic to treat this sort of. This resurgence of the past as a haunting. Tell us about that. I loved it.

[A]

So the way does, in my opinion, that magical realism and the gothic help to deal with these topics that are hard to discuss is because they put them at a distance. Like, obviously, when we read a novel that we know is fiction, we are aware that it's fiction. But if there are elements that sort of enhance this fiction because they're not real elements, it sort of becomes easier and both easier to read, easier to sort of deal with as well. It's easier to come to terms with, in a sense. So the gothic, for example, helps to convey the dark atmosphere of a dark past. But because we know it's fiction, we think, okay, it's just very dark because this is sort of using gothic elements, so it has to be dark. And that helps us read about something that is dark in itself. And if there is a bit of magic or magical elements of sorts, it is easier to address hard realities through this fictional world that we've created, even if these things are part of our past, of our history. And in this chapter, I really also. I do recommend all the novels that I study of sleep. What I found this very, very, very interesting because obviously I was familiar with the history of the Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes and so on. But I was familiar in the sense that I knew it had happened, but no one had talked to me in detail about them. It had come up in conversation, but very slightly, very in a very subtle manner, like, yes, that happened. Let's move on. And so when I was reading the. The novels, I was struck that they were mentioned. I was a struck that they were novels for. For young adult readers. Because it's not something that, I mean, now it's. It's been Included, I believe, in the history programs of secondary schools, but it's only been very recent.

[B]

That's very recent. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. So it's not something that teenagers will know about. Like, you will go to any teenager and ask, do you know about marking lingeries? And they may have no idea what you're talking about. So it very important because it's part of history. Yeah, but then again, you have the. The problem of these people may go to Catholic schools, or the Catholic school gonna say, this happened. And we were in part responsible about this, but so was the state. Yeah, it's just. I know it's. It's very, very complex. And everything I've spoken about is. Everything I've mentioned in the book about it. I've done. I've done, like, from a stance of. Of research, because I know I was not there, obviously, but I feel like it's very significant to keep bringing light into these matters. And so through the supernatural narratives, it's just easier. Because, for example, in Old Bad Apples, we have Dina, who's going through this sort of journey through Ireland to find out about her family, her female ancestors in particular, and how they've been wronged by patriarchy and how they. How they become these sort of bad apples. Because she saw that she's not a bad apple that's been cursed because she's a lesbian. And so she's going through the journey. And we see, like, the book is sort of. There is this sort of eerie atmosphere to the book and what's happening, because what happened was eerie to a point, but it makes it easier. Like, we have. Okay, we have this fictional character looking at the lives of her fictional family ancestors and the story of Julia, who is her great, great, great. Maybe another great grandmother who's been sent to the. To the Magdalene Laundry. Well, it's the sort of institution that blends both Magdalene Laundry and she's been sent there because she was raped by her own grandfather. And obviously that's a fictional case, but it's very likely that that happened in some cases in real life. So you get to become familiar with that and you get to understand it and learn about it and inform yourself about it from, like, at a distance, let's say, which makes it easier. And then, for example, in Perfectly Preventable Debts and Precious Catastrophe, we see how the novels deal with violence against women and girls. And I don't know if this was only my experience, but when I was a language assistant here in Spain, I think it's worldwide. But we do commemorate the day against Violence against women and girls on the 25th of November. So I prepare an activity to do with us in my Spanish class. And I asked them, the students, this was six years, if they knew any about the statistics of violence against women and girls in Ireland. And they didn't because they said, it's not something that we do talk about. So I feel like Deirdre Sullivan's book do help bridge this gap in a sense, like the violence itself. I mean, it's explicit in the book, but not that it's violence against women and girls, that's not specified. But we see through the character of Lon, who's a supernatural creature that's. And this has been argued by Jennifer Mooney, he embodies patriarchy. And so we see how patriarchy produces this violin, how this island has become systemic and systematic, and that is embodied through Lon, a bad creature. So we put the bass into a character and we take it out of the world we live in. So it's easier to deal with. It's easier to learn about it this way and to become familiar with it and come to terms with it. And in other Words, for a Smoke by Sarah Maria Griffin, which I have to say, I had to read twice to fully get the meaning behind the book, what the book was exploring. And there is a sentence in the book that really struck me. And. And it plays with this idea of the supernatural being representing the bash of the real world. And in one scene in the book, Audrey, she's a character named Audrey, she's explaining that because in the book we do have a lot of characters. I cannot get into the. Reading it a bit, boss. And so we have this character explaining that when one of the girls, Deborah, when she died, she had died after escaping a Magdalene Laundry, and she had died giving birth in a grocery, sort of. I think it's sort of a reference to Ann Lovitz, to what happened to Ann Lovich in 1984. So when these happen, Audrey explains, when Deb died, the world got displeased, open, and bad things came true. I mean, that's not the exact quote, but basically, Deborah's death had given a space for bad things coming into the world, which are not personified because they're not people, but sort of symbolized by Sweet James and Bobby Deer, which are two creatures that get into the world after Deborah's death. And so we see how, for example, Sweet James becomes a sort of presence that's trapped within the house walls to avoid him doing bad things. And they do represent. They do Symbolize the wrongs of Deborah's death. Why had Deborah's death been caused? And we see that all the characters in these books, they're haunted by this past that is symbolized through supernatural creatures or through this idea of the bad curse, of the family curse. In the case of Dina and all the bad apples, they are haunted because these are things that have not been dealt with, they have not been talked about. So how do you find closure? I mean, you might never find closure of a traumatic experience because trauma is terribly complex. But this is why the haunting happens in this book, because the experiences of the new generations are marked, are defined by the experiences of the previous generations that never dealt or that were subjected to terrible acts of violence that cannot be possibly dealt with. And I find that. I don't know. It's important. It's significant. It has a lot of value that it's been dealt with and that teenagers are having access to these stories because it's part of the history of Ireland. And there's been effort to hide this history of Ireland when bodies were found within nearby the buildings that were used as microwave laundries and other baby homes. They've been quickly cremated. And there's been an attempt. Records have been hidden, records have not even kept to avoid knowing about this. So the fact that these novels are putting this and they're bringing the focus of their novels to these is very, very important. And we have these from the perspective of Sapphic teenagers, which gives us. On the one hand, it supports this idea that I hold throughout the book that queer stories are about more than queerness. And Sapphic girls are not just. Should not, should never be reduced to their sexuality. And it also sort of brings this idea that I don't know of this subversion of identity. I think that we have these novels dealing with these topics and we have Sapphic characters dealing with these things because obviously the queer experience is. It's haunted, in a sense, by the traumas of the past. I don't know. Makes sense, but I think it's very, very good. And I think some of these reads should be mandatory in schools or at least in their recommendation list that they have. Especially now that these topics. Topics are going to be dealt with as part of the school curriculum. I think they will really, really help to. Is the story. Is the telling of these stories into the kids. Definitely. And they're books that I'll never be tired to recommend.

[B]

No, no.

[A]

Indeed.

[B]

Indeed.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I think listeners to the podcast are going away with a big TBR list after all of the discussion of the book. Books that we've mentioned. So that brings us to the end of your book, which came out just what, three months ago? I imagine you've been busy since then. What have you been working on? Is there anything else that's going to be coming out? Articles or anything that we can look forward to?

[A]

Yes. So I've been busy with teaching, to be fair. Fair enough. That's also something we gotta do. We gotta do. So I've been very busy with teaching, but I am. I recently wrote the first draft of a chapter for a volume on Irish ethnic minority writing, I think so in that I focus on Adiba Dergadar and also on Saina Boladal. I hope I am pronouncing the name. I don't know either to be fair. So if the draft goes okay, that should be published, I think maybe in the summer this year. I am writing in collaboration with a colleague of mine at the University of Str. Madura, Dr. Daviso Toga Fernandez. We are writing an article which is. We've combined both of our fields because he does linguistics and I do literature. And we are writing an article about Suffolk terminology in Irish ya, which I think should be very, very interesting. I do have another chapter to write about Innovative Rising that I will combine with Innovative Irish Racing that I will combine with ya because it's what you do. What I know about, honestly. So I need to get working on that. I will be publishing special issue with a colleague of mine from the University of Vigo, Dr. Santa Clara, about girlhood studies.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So it's a special issue in the Journal of Artistic and Literary Creation and that should come out in March, hopefully. Excellent.

[B]

Soon. Soon.

[A]

Yeah. This year I've learned how complicated it is to. To deal with, to. To manage any special issues.

[B]

Academic publishing, it's. It's quite something. Yes.

[A]

And then I. I do have other projects in mind, but they've not taken off yet. They are just. They're just a draft, let's say in the. Not even on the computer on a piece of paper.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But yes, I do. I do have quite a bit of. Quite a few things going on. I. I do like. I do like researching and obviously I'm keeping up with. With ir. I do have a lot to read because.

[B]

So much.

[A]

There's a lot being published. So I do have a TBR list myself and I do need to get on that because I want to update my.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like I think I'm. I definitely want to be working with these novels again. And with these authors again but I think I should include new authors and new words new books coming out. My my focus I mean my focus is always going to be I think Suffolk identity to a point but I like to explore other things as well to do with Irish literature and to do with ya so I always keep an eye out for that for the millions of publications.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

That I need to keep up with.

[B]

Yeah well lots of exciting things at various different stages which is often the case place I I think so thank thank you so much for taking the time to to talk us through your your your wonderful book. Readers are interested it's entitled Sapphic Adolescent Girls in Irish Young Adult Fiction Queering Girlhood and I think everyone listening will have understood that. I do recommend that I do recommend it so thank you Iria so much for taking the time to talk to me about the book today.

[A]

Thank you. Bye bye bye thank you. Thank you so much.