One day nearly three years ago, Brendan Graham heard a voice that was different from all the others: Listen my child you say to me/ I am the Voice of your history/ I am the Voice in the wind and the pouring rain/ I am the Voice of your hunger and pain.
Having already penned the Eurovision Song Contest winner, Rock and Roll Kids, and hundreds of other songs, he knew this was a voice to which he should listen. The Voice went on to win the competition in 1996 but it would also lead Graham in a completely new direction.
At 50, Brendan Graham moved away from the piano and towards the writing desk. "It was when I finished The Voice or was working on it. I decided to write a cycle of three songs to explore Irish themes about the land and it was those songs that drew me into the story of The Whitest Flower, Ellen's story."
Graham's first literary effort is an historical novel set during the Famine. It follows Ellen "Ruah" O'Malley's attempts to survive the great hunger with her family in the west of Ireland. Amazingly, the UK publisher HarperCollins snapped it up on the strength of just one chapter.
Publication was not the motivation for writing the novel; it was a personal journey, says Graham. "I hadn't been consciously thinking about the Famine when I was writing The Voice, but I was starting along a path."
During interviews for Eurovision, he was surprised that many European, but no Irish, journalists asked questions about whether the lyrics were Famine-related. "After the Great Famine, we had the great silence up until the 1960s. Even then, the early attempts were to explain it away as a natural disaster. It's only in more recent times, and especially in the last few years, that so much academic work has been done on the subject," says Graham.
"But one wonders if that reaches out and touches ordinary lives? Do other people, who wouldn't have contact with academia, have the same question bubbling within them that was within me?"
Graham's inner search led him across the world, to the Ngarringjeri people of south Australia's Coorong, the "Vineyard of the Empire" in Oz's Barossa Valley, an Irish cemetery in Grosse Ile, Canada, and the Deer Island quarantine station in Boston. Throughout the trip, he said, "I wondered - my own name is Graham, which is not really an Irish name, it's a Scots name. The question struck me, what did my people do in the Famine? Was it at the cost of other lives?"
Red-haired Ellen is the culmination of this research. Her epic journey begins with a prophecy from an old woman: "But the whitest flower will be the blackest flower and you, red-haired Ellen, must crush its petals in your hand." The whitest flower is the potato plant's tiny bloom, which blackened when hit by the blight in 1845.
Mixing historical fact with fiction was not an easy task for the first-time novelist from Nenagh, Co Tipperary. "My naivety propelled me forward. Taking on a subject like this is a huge risk. How can you dramatise the recorded events of people withering away on the roadside? As far as I know, there haven't been many novels written on the Great Famine." Unusually for a fictional work, the book includes historical quotes from the time, maps, and comments from today's leaders about the effect the Irish Famine had on their countries. Graham's experience as a songwriter helped him organise chapters and pick out what was important. However, writing a novel was completely foreign to him. "It was very different. A song is like a three minute jingle. There's only one point and not much room for development. I found novel-writing liberating in the extreme in that you become one with your main character. You don't have one view of the world all the time and you have more scope to follow things."
Despite the differences between the two forms, Graham drew on his experience of language as a lyricist. "I found myself writing lines with internal rhythms and rhymes, almost like they were taken from a lyric. It certainly made the writing more interesting."
"I suppose, for me, Ellen does represent Ireland. She represents many Irelands, the one that suffered, the one divided, the Ireland consumed with shame and guilt and silence, but ultimately she represents an Ireland that survived both here and through its people in other countries."
Adaptability must be Graham's middle name. In his 53 years he's been, among other things, a basketball player, student priest, shoe salesman, clothing manufacturer, songwriter and now novelist. When the final changes to the novel were completed, he peered out his kitchen window in suburban Dublin and saw a white flower. Upon further inspection, he noticed the plant was growing in an old compost heap and, much to his surprise and delight, he discovered that it was a potato flower. It had adapted to survive.
The Whitest Flower by Brendan Graham is published by HarperCollins on November 16th, price £16.99 in UK.