‘We left Ireland because there wasn’t work – and we wanted to get the hell away’: Trespasses author Louise Kennedy

Her Troubles-set debut became a hit TV series starring Gillian Anderson. Now the novelist has returned to her teen years for a follow-up. She talks about her journey from chef to author, and how her cancer diagnosis inspired her to writeLouise Kennedy’s life has hardly wanted for dramatic events, but the recent past has been spectacularly busy, even by her standards. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, as we chat in the sitting room of the house in Sligo that she shares with her husband, son and daughter, but this is the home that she once thought would be repossessed. The couple bought it “for stupid money” in 2007, when they also opened a restaurant, initially so successful that the only way seemed to be up. The following year, financial mayhem descended on Ireland, their customers ebbed away, and the Celtic Tiger years morphed into a country racked with job losses, bankruptcies, apparently endless debt. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to keep the house,” she s