Visit by Peadar O’Guilin

Monday 26^th September 2016

When his audience heard that his latest novel featured fairies as the bad guys, Peadar O’Guilin quickly reversed our image of these creatures by describing the Irish Sidhe as malevolent human sized creatures.  In Irish mythology they are sinister beings who seek revenge on humans for banishing them to the underworld.  Even today farmers plough around fairy forts, and a motorway was diverted around a hawthorn tree said to be sacred to the fairies.

In The Call, the fairies have been kidnapping teenagers for the past 25 years, and taking them to the grey land, a sinister underworld where they have a whole day to fight for their lives.  They are only away from the real world for 3 minutes, but few of them return alive or unscathed.  Ireland has been completely cut off from the rest of the world, so there is no internet, transport or communications.  The government has created survival colleges where children are trained to combat the violence they will find when they are called.  Nessa, the main character, has to contend with her disability caused by childhood polio.

Peadar loves reading science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and his favourite authors are George R R Martin and Neal Stephenson.  Lord of the Rings was his favourite book when he was a child.  He loves being a writer, although he works part of the week as a computer programmer.  The hardest part is the redrafting and editing to create a finished novel, as this process often produces new ideas which he then has to find a way of putting in the book.

The dystopian and political elements of The Call should inspire the year 9 boys, who are studying The Hunger Games and Animal Farm in their English lessons.   He talked to a year 7 class about stories and creative writing.  Peadar is soon to visit Waterstones in London, and tour the USA to promote his new book.