Interview: Fiona Murphy

THE BELFAST REVIEW TEAM

22 Feb, 2026

Our newest blog contributor, writer and academic Dr Fiona Murphy, talks about her inspiration, the importance of Irish women writers, the current refugee crisis and her own family history of displacement, and offers words of wisdom for upcoming writers.

Ten Questions for Fiona Murphy

TBR: Tell us about when you first started writing. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer, or was it something that happened gradually?

FM: I started writing poetry very young. I was about seven, filling the backs of copybooks with lines I didn’t yet have the language to explain. It felt instinctive, a way of arranging attention, of responding to the world before I knew how to analyse it. Writing, then, was closer to listening.

At some point, I stopped. Confidence thinned as I began to measure my words against external standards. The poems moved into journals, then into folders on my computer, kept but not shared. Writing became private, something done quietly and without expectation.

Academic training later reshaped my relationship to language. I learned how to argue, how to situate myself within debates, how to write in ways that were legible to institutions. That discipline mattered. But it also pulled me toward forms of writing that prized certainty and control, and away from those that allowed doubt, texture, and feeling. Poetry didn’t disappear, but it learned to stay out of sight.

I was fortunate to find myself within anthropology, a discipline that has long taken writing seriously as a form of thinking rather than mere presentation. Anthropology asks you to stay with people, with places, with contradictions. It trains you to listen carefully, to notice what exceeds categories, to resist easy conclusions. Within that tradition, there is real space for creativity, for experiment, for writing that moves between analysis and story without treating them as opposites.

That mattered more than I realised at the time. It gave me permission, slowly, to return to the kinds of language I had set aside, and to understand them not as a retreat from rigour but as another way of practising it.

In recent years, and particularly since the pandemic, something shifted. The world felt too exposed, too unequal, to keep pretending that only one register could speak truth. I began to recover a different kind of bravery. I started sharing my poetry and hybrid writing more publicly, without waiting for permission or certainty.

I don’t see this as a simple return so much as an integration. Writing now is a way of holding analysis and tenderness together, of attending to the world with care, and of insisting that how we write shapes not only what we know, but how we live with one another.

TBR: Who are some of your greatest influences as a writer?

FM: I’m most influenced by writers who use the personal essay as a way of thinking in public, rather than confessing in private. Maggie Nelson showed me that intimacy can be rigorous, that the self can be a site of ethical inquiry rather than self-display. Rebecca Solnit taught me that clarity is a political practice, that essays can widen the horizon of what feels possible by paying close attention to history, language, and power.

Closer to home, writers like Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Sinéad Gleeson have been formative. Their work makes space for the body, for illness, for motherhood, for memory, without sealing those experiences off from the wider social and historical worlds that shape them. They write from Irish contexts with precision and tenderness, and without shrinking the frame.

Anthropology has shaped me just as profoundly, particularly through the people I’ve worked with rather than through theory alone. Indigenous Australians I have spent time with during my research taught me a great deal about storytelling as responsibility rather than performance. About silence, refusal, repetition, and the ethics of what should not be said. Their ways of holding history, grief, and care unsettled many of my assumptions about authorship and voice, and taught me that not all stories are meant to be completed, circulated, or resolved.

Listening to people living with displacement, with loss, with fractured belonging has also shaped how I write. It has made me attentive to fragments, to pauses, to what resists narration. Influence, for me, doesn’t only come from books. It comes from being trusted with parts of other people’s lives, and from learning how much care it takes to hold those stories without claiming them.

Across all of this, I’m drawn to writing that moves between lyric and argument, between the personal and the structural. Writing that resists spectacle, refuses simplification, and treats paying attention as an ethical act. Those are the voices, on and off the page, that continue to shape how I write and why.

TBR: Are there specific resources, opportunities, or cultural elements in Ireland that you feel help you as a writer/ creative?

FM: Ireland has a quietly strong culture of literary generosity, and I’ve been shaped by that as much as by any single institution. I’ve attended many workshops at the Irish Writers Centre, which has been an important space for craft, encouragement, and permission. What I value most there is the seriousness with which writers at all stages are treated, and the sense that experimentation is not something you have to apologise for.

Writing festivals across Ireland also do a great deal of this work. They don’t just showcase finished books, but invest in process. More recently, at the Dingle Literary Festival, I attended a tarot and creative writing workshop with Anya Bergman that was genuinely transformative. It reminded me how playful, intuitive, and supportive writing spaces can be, and how creativity often opens up when it’s approached sideways rather than head-on.

Beyond formal settings, writer-led groups and informal collectives have been crucial. There’s a strong ethic of mutual support here, of sharing drafts, time, and attention. Writing doesn’t feel like a solitary pursuit so much as a conversation that keeps widening.

I’m also very fortunate to work at Dublin City University, which actively supports academics doing creative and publicly engaged work. That institutional backing matters. It signals that creative writing is not a detour from intellectual life, but one of its vital forms. Having that support makes it possible to take risks, to write across registers, and to bring work into the world that sits between scholarship, poetry, and public conversation.

Taken together, these spaces form a kind of infrastructure of care. They make it possible to keep writing, not just by offering opportunities, but by sustaining the belief that language, imagination, and shared attention still matter.

TBR: Do you feel the current culture in Ireland supports and encourages artistic discussions and portrayals of social justice? Or is there more to be done in being able to talk about certain topics?

FM: For the most part, yes. Ireland has a relatively open artistic culture, and there is a genuine appetite for work that engages questions of justice, inequality, and historical responsibility. There’s also a strong public literacy around struggle, shaped by Ireland’s own histories of colonialism, displacement, and resistance. That makes certain conversations possible in ways that aren’t everywhere.

Ireland’s long-standing and visible solidarity with Palestine is one example of this. Artists, writers, and cultural workers here have often been willing to speak out, to make connections between local histories and global injustices, and to resist the pressure to depoliticise suffering. That matters. It creates a cultural atmosphere where international solidarities don’t feel abstract, but relational.

That said, there is always more to be done. Some topics remain easier to approach than others, particularly when they challenge contemporary state policies, institutional complicity, or Ireland’s role within global systems of border control, extraction, or exclusion. Social justice work is often welcomed when it aligns with existing moral consensus, and becomes more uncomfortable when it asks harder questions about responsibility, power, or benefit.

Art has an important role here. Not to offer answers, but to widen what can be spoken, and how. To hold space for complexity without retreating into neutrality. I think Ireland has the foundations for this kind of cultural conversation. The task now is to keep that space open, and to ensure it remains attentive not only to the stories we are proud to tell, but also to the ones that unsettle us.

TBR: How do you personally strike a balance between hope and despair when portraying the current refugee crisis?

FM: I don’t think of hope and despair as opposites. Despair is often a form of clarity, a way of seeing the scale of what is being done in the name of policy, security, or indifference. To look directly at displacement, detention, and prolonged uncertainty without feeling despair would be a kind of refusal.

Hope, for me, doesn’t come from resolution or reassurance. It comes from practice. From the ways people continue to care for one another under impossible conditions, from everyday acts of solidarity that rarely make it into official narratives. I see it in mutual aid, in friendship, in the stubborn insistence on dignity even when systems are designed to erode it.

In my writing, I try to stay close to lives rather than abstractions. Statistics matter, but they can also anaesthetise. What I’m interested in is the texture of waiting, the ethics of hospitality, the small decisions that shape whether someone feels seen or erased. Holding onto detail is one way of resisting despair without pretending it can be undone by optimism.

I also try not to rush towards hope as a conclusion. Sometimes the most honest thing a piece of writing can do is remain unsettled. To acknowledge that there are no clean endings, only ongoing responsibilities. For me, that is where a different kind of hope lives: not in certainty, but in the refusal to turn away, and in the belief that how we attend to one another still matters, even when the outcome is unclear.

TBR: The history of Ireland includes many examples of displacement, with Irish people becoming refugees both at ‘home’ and abroad. Why, in your opinion, is it important to keep talking (or creating art) about this?

FM: Because forgetting is not neutral. It is political. Ireland’s histories of famine, eviction, forced migration, and exile are often folded into heritage, but too rarely into responsibility. When displacement is safely placed in the past, it can be sentimentalised rather than mobilised as an ethical demand. Art has an important role in refusing that comfort.

Ireland knows what it means to be displaced both at home and abroad, to be rendered surplus, criminalised, or pushed to the margins. That history is not a metaphor. It is a material inheritance that shapes the present, including how racialised people seeking refuge are treated now. To keep talking about displacement is to insist on continuity where the state often prefers rupture, and to challenge the idea that suffering becomes harmless once it is historicised.

This is also an anti-racist task. Ireland’s willingness to remember its own histories of migration does not automatically translate into justice for those arriving today, particularly Black and Brown migrants and asylum seekers. Art can expose that gap. It can ask difficult questions about who is granted empathy, whose suffering is legible, and whose presence is framed as a problem to be managed. Anti-racism requires more than goodwill; it requires confronting how borders, housing, and welfare systems reproduce racial hierarchies, even in places that imagine themselves as hospitable.

Creating art about displacement matters because policy language flattens experience. It turns people into numbers, crises into management problems, and racism into something abstract or accidental. Art works against that flattening. It insists on memory, specificity, and accountability. It makes visible the human cost of systems designed to exclude.

In the context of Ireland, continuing to write and create around displacement is a way of resisting selective empathy. It is a way of insisting that solidarity must be practised, not inherited, and that anti-racism is not separate from memory, but one of its most urgent consequences.

TBR: As a woman in the arts, how has the landscape changed in your opinion in regards to how stories by women are received?

FM: One of the most heartening shifts, for me, has been the strength and visibility of a community of women writers across the island of Ireland. There is a real sense now of women writing alongside one another rather than in isolation, shaping literary culture collectively rather than asking for permission to enter it.

Writers like Sinéad Gleeson and Doireann Ní Ghríofa have been central to this, not only through their own work but through editing, mentoring, and making space for others. I also think of Jan Carson, whose writing from the North attends carefully to lives shaped by violence, faith, class, and aftermath, without flattening them into allegory.

Writers like Katie Goh have also been crucial in expanding what counts as voice and subject matter in Irish writing, bringing questions of race, belonging, inheritance, and cultural memory into the centre of the conversation, rather than leaving them at the margins.

Poetry has been just as important to this shift. Poets such as Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Vona Groarke, Leontia Flynn, Sinéad Morrissey, and Tara Bergin have long insisted that women’s interior lives, domestic spaces, political inheritances, and linguistic experiments belong at the centre of Irish literature. Their work has reshaped not just what can be said, but how it can be said.

Beyond these, there is an extraordinary range of women writing with confidence and urgency across genres, including Sara Baume, Eimear McBride, Lisa McInerney, Emma Dabiri, Mary Costello, Elaine Feeney, Lucy Caldwell, and Wendy Erskine. What connects this work is a refusal to diminish complexity or soften ambition.

Reception is still uneven. Stories by women are often more readily welcomed when they are read as intimate or confessional, and more resisted when they are structural, angry, or explicitly political. But what has changed is that women writers are far less isolated in facing that resistance. There is now a critical mass, a confidence, and a collective presence that makes dismissal harder.

What feels most powerful about this moment is that women’s writing on this island is not simply seeking inclusion within existing frameworks. It is actively reshaping them, expanding what counts as seriousness, what counts as form, and whose lives are understood to matter. Being part of that landscape feels less like standing alone, and more like standing among others, in conversation, argument, and shared attention.

TBR: In your poem 'rage, anyway', you mention a family history that includes themes of separation, exile, and being driven from home. What are some of the advantages (and likewise, disadvantages) that perspective gives you in talking to others about the subject?

FM: That history gives me a certain orientation rather than authority. My grandfather spent time in an industrial school, and that experience shaped not just his life, but the emotional architecture of the family that followed. Alongside that, like many Irish families, ours has been marked by repeated waves of separation through emigration, particularly to the United States. Leaving was often framed as opportunity, but it carried its own quiet violences: long absences, fractured kinship, a sense of belonging stretched thin across oceans and generations.

The advantage of growing up with those stories is a sensitivity to how displacement works over time. It teaches you that separation is rarely a single event. It accumulates. It echoes. It leaves traces in how people relate to home, to authority, to one another. That perspective helps me recognise the depth of what is at stake when people are forced to leave, or when families are broken apart by systems that present themselves as benevolent or necessary.

But there are also limits. Inherited histories can open a door to empathy, but they don’t grant equivalence. The danger is in assuming understanding where there is only proximity, or in letting one story stand in for another. I’m very aware that my family’s experiences, shaped by class, race, and citizenship, are not the same as those of people living through forced displacement today.

So I try to hold that history lightly. Not as a claim, but as a responsibility. It reminds me to listen carefully, to resist easy parallels, and to stay attentive to difference as much as connection. If that perspective offers anything in conversation, I hope it’s a willingness to approach the subject with humility, and an understanding that displacement is not just about movement, but about what is carried forward, often silently, long after the journey is over.

TBR: If you could go back in time and give yourself advice as a young writer starting out, what would it be?

FM: I would tell myself not to be so afraid of judgement. Not to confuse being unseen with being safe. Silence can feel protective, but it has its own cost. I would say: let the work out sooner, even when it feels unfinished or uncertain. Writing doesn’t become braver by waiting.

I would also say: find your people. Writing can look solitary from the outside, but it survives through community. Through shared drafts, conversations, encouragement, disagreement. The moment writing becomes only a private test of worth, it starts to shrink. Being in the company of others who care about language, who argue with generosity, who stay curious, changes everything.

I often return to a phrase that circulates through activist and critical traditions: read, rethink, resist. It isn’t a slogan so much as a practice. Read widely and deeply, beyond what confirms you. Rethink what you’ve been taught to accept as natural or inevitable. Resist, not only in overtly political ways, but in how you refuse speed, simplification, and the pressure to be immediately legible.

I also think of Mary Oliver, particularly her clear-eyed writing about regret. She reminds us that the real danger isn’t in getting things wrong, but in not giving yourself fully to the life and work that keep asking for your attention. Writing is part of that attention. It’s a way of saying yes to what insists, even when it feels exposing.

For writers starting out now, amid constant noise and political upheaval, I’d add this: protect your attention fiercely. Don’t let speed or visibility decide what matters. Let your work be shaped by care rather than performance. Writing has always been made under difficult conditions. What sustains it isn’t certainty or approval, but the decision to keep going, in conversation with others, even when the path feels unclear.

In the end, the advice is simple, if not easy: read deeply, rethink often, resist what diminishes you, and trust that the work will grow braver as you do.

TBR: If you could have an original copy of any book ever written, what would it be?

FM: I think I would choose an early manuscript of the Dindshenchas, the body of place-lore poems and prose that tell the stories of how places came to be named. What draws me to it is the way landscape, memory, myth, and loss are braided together. Every hill, river, and plain carries a story of love, violence, exile, or transformation. Geography becomes a form of archive.

The Dindshenchas isn’t interested in a single authoritative version of the past. It holds multiple tellings, contradictions, fragments. It understands that place is not neutral, that land remembers what has happened on it, and that stories are one way of staying accountable to that memory.

I’m less interested in originality as rarity than in continuity. I would want a manuscript marked by use, by translation, by return. Something that shows how knowledge survives through repetition and care rather than preservation alone. A book that reminds us that history is not only something we record, but something we inhabit.

In many ways, that tradition mirrors how I think about writing now: as a way of paying attention to where we are, what has been carried forward, and what refuses to be forgotten.

AUTHOR BIO

Fiona Murphy is an Irish anthropologist and writer based in Dublin. She works across poetry, ethnography, and creative nonfiction, with a focus on displacement, memory, and solidarity. Her work has been published in academic journals and creative anthologies. She is co-editor of Anthropology and Humanism.