Anne said, “I had no idea when I returned to Ulster in 1998 with a sketch of a novel based on a childhood in the Armagh area in the 1940s that my story would expand to stretch across a century, or that it would fulfil my childhood ambition to write ‘stories about here’, because all the stories I read in my own childhood were about remote places and people I didn’t know.
In the spring of 2000, writing about the scents and sounds of a May evening when young Clare Hamilton paused for a break from her studies in ‘On A Clear Day’, I thought of her grandmother and great-grandmother. They beckoned to me. That was the beginning of the Hamiltons’ sequence.
To have fulfilled that ambition with the richness of resource available to me both from the libraries in Armagh and progressively available on line has to be the best of times”.
A spokesperson for the City Chapter said, “Anne has been a tremendous supporter of the City Chapter and its aims to promote the spoken and written word. We are, therefore, delighted to have the opportunity to celebrate her twelfth novel and wish her well for the next one.”
Image credit and copyright: Ian Maginess
