A native of Castlebar, Co. Mayo, Sally Rooney was born in 1991 to a father who worked for Telecom Éireann and a mother who ran the local arts centre. Both were avid readers, and Rooney grew up in a house full of books. At fifteen, she joined a local writing group and completed her first novel. Rooney describes it as “absolute trash”; but even as a teenage writer, her chief concerns were “people getting into relationships, breaking up and getting back together.”

 It’s only natural, then, that it is the pull-and-tug of relationships that drives her début, ‘Conversations with Friends’. The novel was at the centre of a seven-way bidding war before being published in 2017 by Faber & Faber. It follows protagonist Frances, a twenty-one-year-old English Literature student at Trinity, as she embarks on an affair with the older married actor Nick – all while navigating tricky relationships with her best friend/ex-girlfriend Bobbi, her parents, and indeed herself. Acclaim was near-universal. The novel went on to pick up nominations for the Dylan Thomas Prize among others; Rooney also netted the 2017 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

Prior to the publication of ‘Conversations with Friends’, Rooney’s work made appearances in ‘Granta’, ‘The White Review’, ‘The Stinging Fly’, and ‘Winter Pages’. A few months prior to the publication of her début, her story ‘Mr Salary’ was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.  But it was an essay in ‘The Dublin Review’ that brought her to the attention of Tracy Bohan of the Wylie Agency, agent to the likes of Eimear McBride and Ali Smith.

Rooney has always been a consummate high-achiever and during her time at Trinity, she was involved in debating with the Hist and was subsequently recognised as the best competitive debater in Europe in 2013. In an interview with ‘The Guardian’, Rooney mused that she may have “an aversion to failure”.

 Rooney has been hailed as a voice of a generation; more specifically, as the  “Salinger of the Snapchat generation”. Her prose is modern, sleek and crisp with sudden, brief flashes of beauty; her narrative voice is dispassionate, her characters all too quick to retreat into detached irony as a safe haven from sincerity and the vulnerability that entails. She has noted the influence of Twitter on her style and tone, and exchanges over instant messenger nestle beside in-person dialogue throughout her work. Rooney has dismissed ambitions of timelessness, instead expressing a wish to record “this specific cultural moment”.

 Rooney’s hotly-anticipated second novel, ‘Normal People’, arrived in September this year. It charts the course of the turbulent on-again off-again romance between Marianne and Connell – from their teenage years in Sligo to their coming of age as they attend Trinity. Praise has come from all corners once again. Anne Enright labelled it “superb”; ‘The Guardian’, “a future classic”. But the cherry on the cake was when Rooney made the longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, announced before her novel had even hit the shelves.

A BBC Three adaptation of ‘Normal People’ is already in the works, with the Oscar-nominated Lenny Abrahamson poised to direct and Rooney herself penning the scripts. Given the speed with which she delivered her first two books, all indications would point to readers not having long to wait before a follow-up. Regardless of when it arrives, Rooney has surely cemented her place as the shining hope of the Irish literary scene. When Sebastian Barry singled her out as an example of the current ‘golden age of Irish prose’, after he was announced as laureate for Irish fiction, it merely seemed like confirmation of a given.

Despite it all, Rooney remains modest. In interviews, she is self-deprecating, dismissing what she does as “just stories about fake people”. But she’s not afraid to be outspoken when a subject excites her passion. She is unashamedly political, marking her arrival on the media scene with a declaration for Marxism. She has disavowed Yeats for his flirtation with fascism, stating that  a lot of his poems are “not very good”. Yeats’ Ireland was one of noble peasants and romantic rural idylls, one that looked to the past as its ideal, but Rooney’s Ireland is bracingly modern, almost “post-Irish”. Rooney’s Ireland, or her Dublin at least, is as cosmopolitan as anywhere else in the world. Her characters, rather than suffering the burdens of Catholic conservatism and repressed sexuality, struggle to figure out how to maintain their ideals and communicate meaningfully under a capitalism they see as predatory and out of control. Their concerns are those of most millennials in the Western world. As Ireland comes to embrace a new, liberal, European identity, Rooney may find herself as more than the voice of a generation; but a writer entirely in tune with the concerns of her place and time.