IRELAND – It’s been 25 years since the first Harry Potter book was published in June 1997. For my generation, who were the original group of children who grew up reading those books, the near-annual publication of a new instalment was a huge event, the highlight of many a summer, and kept us captivated by a magical world long after we’d have naturally put aside children’s stories.
Cat was 11 when she was given the first two Potter books back in the summer of 1998, shortly after the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets had come out. Living in Ireland, she got into the series ahead of most of my contemporaries, thanks to her English grandfather who had heard about the hype that was growing around the books in the UK and had obligingly brought them over on his annual visit. her sister and she devoured them; by the time the first film appeared, in 2001, most of their friends had too. Whenever a new book was published, they would draw up a rota to read it – two hours each – reading late into the night, unable to put it down.
When the last book was published in July 2007, a decade after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone made its debut, she was 20 and studying English at Trinity. she still remembers the sadness after finishing it – more than anything else, the conclusion of the series felt like the end of my childhood. However, years later, she has found herself back in a world of magic and adventure through writing books of her own, so it’s clear that the series instilled a long-lasting fascination with the art of storytelling.
Of course, it wasn’t just Harry Potter that encouraged our generation’s love of children’s literature. The 1990s was a particularly rich decade in terms of Irish children’s writers, who were being published by local presses such as Poolbeg, the O’Brien Press and Wolfhound. These formed the backbone of the little classroom libraries of my primary school, and were more accessible and prevalent than any of the overseas titles.
Some of those books are still well-known today: Marita Conlon McKenna’s trilogy set during the Famine had just been published and I remember reading the first of them, Under the Hawthorn Tree, in class. It certainly didn’t gloss over the horror of that period – the intimate descriptions of starvation, disease and death evoke the reality of that time better than any history textbook. Conlon McKenna has a singular gift for evoking places and her descriptions of the Irish countryside, with its yellow gorse and lacy white hawthorn flowers, are particularly vivid, especially as a counterpoint to the unrelenting human suffering that makes up so much of the narrative. Although Under the Hawthorn Tree had only been published for a few years when we read it in class, there was already the sense that it was destined to become a classic.
Another writer who dominated Irish children’s literature when she was growing up was Siobhán Parkinson. She would read Sisters… No Way! and the fantastically named Four Kids, Three Cats, Two Cows, One Witch (Maybe), but it was only when she started writing this piece that she realised that she’d also written Amelia, a historical novel set in 1914 Dublin and an old favourite of hers. She’d initially picked a plastic-wrapped copy up off her classroom’s bookshelves because she liked the cover – the original one showed a girl in a green dress with elbow-length gloves. The cover illustrates the starting point of the story perfectly: the world is about to go to war, there are stirrings of a rebellion against British rule, but Amelia’s main concern is what dress she’s going to wear to her 13th birthday party. To a 10-year-old who subsequently went on to work at a fashion magazine, this seemed like a fairly sensible set of priorities to me, although of course, Amelia soon finds herself in troubled circumstances with no use whatsoever for a shimmering gown the colour of emeralds. Revisiting it as an adult, it’s clear how Parkinson did a remarkably good job at evoking the atmosphere of such an uneasy, volatile time and making it come to life.
