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I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.

Irish writing is so strong that it can feel like the country has all been covered, but in fact, there are so many gaps. The small west of Ireland cities and the working classes there have almost never appeared in Irish literature, simply because those communities were never in the way of producing books.

Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.

As far as Irish writers being great, I think the fact that there have been two languages in Ireland for a very long time; there has obviously been a shared energy between those two languages.

Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos.

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.