Tell us about your new novel, The Island Retreat.
It is about that huge human need to be healed. It’s set on Corfu where a one-time TV therapy guru, Rose Talisman, has set up a luxurious retreat. One week is hardly enough time for a good Jungian to get the cushions on their chair just so, but a week is a marvellous amount of time to play with in a novel.
Some of the six guests want to be there – like young singer Keera, who’s come out of rehab and wants to sort her life out. Scientist Dan, with his ultra-complex relationship with a tricky on/off girlfriend, doesn’t want to be here at all. He’s fine. What does he need help with? Over the course of a week, they all discover a lot about themselves and each other. There’s wine drunk, arguments had, and unexpected guests in unsuitable shoes rolling up.
You’ve written 24 novels now since your debut Woman to Woman in 1997. Is it getting easier or harder?
It’s never easy. But I have a stronger voice now. For a long time, I felt silenced by the misogyny that still surrounds a lot of women’s novels. In 2026, it’s quite startling that women writers are still blindly judged on some imaginary plane that consists of champagne and pink things. Notably, the people judging have rarely read their work, which seems rather unethical.
The first review I ever had in The Irish Times in 1998 noted that a lot of the novel, my second, was staring fiercely at the unfair division of emotional and domestic labour in relationships. I’m still writing about that. I love the Isak Dinesen quote: “Women, when they are old enough to have done with the business of being women, and can let loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the whole world.”
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You’ve coped with depression for much of your life and had breast cancer just after your divorce. Has writing helped either as a distraction or as a way to channel your emotions and thoughts?
I doubt there’s a writer alive who hasn’t used their personal battles in their work. In this respect, I’m a big fan of the Nora Ephron quote: “Everything is copy.” I haven’t written a cancer book since my diagnosis, but I’ve written about depression all my writing life. I wrote about the #MeToo movement a long, long time ago, in the late ’90s.
I know you were inspired by Patricia Scanlan and Maeve Binchy, but what made you want to become a writer?
Books and stories have been part of my earliest memories. I lived in a fantasy world as a child, and when I was a teenager reading Colette and the Brontës, I never thought that I could be a writer. It takes time to decide to have the courage to write. Because it takes courage to put yourself out there.
You’ve been a Unicef ambassador since 2005.
I was privileged enough to become involved in Unicef when my children were small and had access to medicine, doctors, clean water and education. With Unicef, I’ve travelled around the world seeing children who don’t have these First World basics. I’ve met mothers who were watching their children die from diseases that are entirely preventable in Ireland – coughs, dirty water, diarrhoea, tetanus from getting a newborn’s cord cut with an unsterile knife.
[ Author Cathy Kelly confirms breast cancer diagnosis: ‘I’m doing well’Opens in new window ]
Right now in Yemen, a forgotten war, a child dies every 13 minutes. Eighty per cent of the population is on the poverty line and cholera is rampant. Yet this war is so rarely in the news. Working with Unicef allows me to visit countries where people are on their knees and my job is to attempt to raise funds to lift them up.
Which projects are you working on?
I’m working on a new book and concurrently on a children’s book. But as I change everything up until at least halfway through, I can say no more. I’ve also just moved house and the whole place has to be rewired, so I am looking mournfully at all the things I’ve carefully put away (and trust me, there’s a lot more that’s still in boxes) and thinking of how we’ll manage it all with two small elderly dogs and a cat who is queen of all she surveys.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Many aeons ago, I went to Bath to pay homage to Jane Austen and drink the water in the spa. Then, in a similar vein, I had to visit Glastonbury because I’d been immersed in books about the Arthurian legend: TH White’s Once and Future King series and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon series.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity” – TS Eliot. I translate this to mean that if you’re absolutely full of fear and anxiety, sit down and find a pen/laptop. Obviously, the whole fear/anxiety thing is less useful in life, but you can’t have everything.
Who do you admire the most?
The people who work on the ground in homeless charities and in NGOs like Unicef.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
There is no one law that would fix everything that needs to be fixed, but if we could collect up all the racists, rapists, child abusers, domestic abusers, homophobes and people who feel that “Ireland is for the Irish” and send them off on a few olde worlde ships without navigational tools, but with some water, a few oranges and a book on how to survive at sea, then that might be a start. They wouldn’t be able to land anywhere because they don’t believe in immigration. It might make for an interesting reality TV show. The Hell Boat. I’d happily be showrunner.
[ Cathy Kelly on life, death, crying and pole-dancingOpens in new window ]
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
I’ve been watching a thrilling German TV show called Unfamiliar, and I’m reading a proof of Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen’s new novel, Our Deadly Summer. To use Dublinese, it’s deadly.
Which public event affected you most?
Basically, this happens every time I go somewhere with Unicef. My last trip was to be Sudan, but shelling near where we were going to stay stopped the trip for the time being. Before that, I was in Turkey in early 2023 looking at the devastation created by the earthquake. Seeing huge apartments flattened with curtains still fluttering in the breeze was shattering. Over 50,000 people died and millions were displaced. Chances to go to university, hopes of new lives: all wiped out because the people are now living in tent cities, have no money and no possessions. Sitting in a Unicef tented classroom with the Leaving Cert-level class near the epicentre, I felt like crying at these brave teenagers trying to study physics and chemistry, yet mourning the loss of their friends who died in the classroom.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
An early edition of Yeats’s poems.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
PG Wodehouse, Jane Austen, Colette, Groucho Marx, Seamus Heaney and Douglas Adams.
The best and worst things about where you live?
I live in Bray which has no worst things, really, except that rain clouds are sitting over it right now. Douglas Adams memorably wrote about a lorry driver who was actually a rain god, and the clouds followed him lovingly. I think we must have a lot of rain gods on this island.
What is your favourite quotation?
I’m a fan of the “Did anybody die? Well then...” vibe.
[ Cathy Kelly: ‘My inner demons could create their own rugby team’Opens in new window ]
A book to make me laugh?
Anything by PG Wodehouse or Marian Keyes. Agatha Christie dedicated a book to Wodehouse in 1969 and he sent her a letter telling her how thrilled he was and that he’d been rereading all her old books. I love rereading all his. Agatha is fabulous at plot and pace, but very much of their time in that the maid is always depicted as thick as a plank. You know when people have past lives, they’re always Egyptian princesses? I’d probably be a maid in an Agatha Christie, desperately trying to solve stuff, but no one would listen to me.
A book that might move me to tears?
When Breath Becomes Air by Dr Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and wrote the most moving memoir about his diagnosis and his last days.
