To write a play, you must "build up a head of steam", said playwright Thomas Kilroy when asked in Dublin yesterday about his approach to writing for the stage. Catherine Foleyreports.
He received this year's Irish Pen/AT Cross Literary Award, which celebrates a lifetime of literary achievement, at a ceremony in Dún Laoghaire last night. But in case anyone might think the Kilkenny-born writer is coming to the end of his career, he added, with great certainty: "I'm still steaming".
Kilroy has just finished a screenplay, The Colleen and the Cowboy, which is to be directed by American film-maker Paul Quinn. Kilroy will work with the Cork-based theatre company, Asylum Productions, on a site-specific work in his native Callan shortly with Donal Gallagher, and he's writing a book about growing up in Co Kilkenny.
As to whether he is a disciplined writer: "I go in spurts," he said. "The thing about plays is they have to be written very fast for them to work . . . you build up a head of steam and they have to be written very fast to work on a stage, so that you get the tempo of a play."
The inaugural Irish Pen/AT Cross Literary Award was presented to John B Keane in 1999. Seamus Heaney, Edna O'Brien and Brian Friel were honoured in following years. More recently Maeve Binchy, John Banville, Neil Jordan and John McGahern have been honoured.
Irish Pen was established in 1921 by Lady Gregory, who was its first president.
Kilroy said he was delighted to receive the award because "it's from other writers. A lot of prize giving is very much part of the marketplace: I don't think this award is like that. It's more prestigious."
Writer Jennifer Johnston, who presented him with the award at a gala dinner in the Royal St George Yacht Club in Dún Laoghaire last night, praised his "wonderful imagination, which is beyond anything, and the grace and the wit with which he writes".
Recalling the staging of The Secret Life of Constance Wildeat the Abbey in 1997, she said: "I just loved the ceremony of the play."