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Michael Collins is candid about the writing life – it’s about sitting ‘in your underwear, with Oprah in the background’. Thankfully, it inspired his new black comedy, writes ARMINTA WALLACE

MICHAEL COLLINS strides across the bar of the Royal Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire as effortlessly as a marathon runner. Then again, he is a marathon runner. A carpeted bar is no challenge to somebody who has legged it across the Antarctic wastes, or up the side of Everest. Tall, dark, handsome and fit, Collins is as unlike the speckled band of assorted coffee-drinkers, tourists and holidaying families dotted around the hotel’s ground floor it’s as if he has been parachuted in, immaculately suited, from another planet.