The award-winning Irish author Colum McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and worked as a journalist before moving to the US and turning his hand to books. His novels include Let the Great World Spin, which won the 2011 International Dublin literary award, and 2020’s Apeirogon, which took a kaleidoscopic view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Last year he co-wrote the memoir American Mother with Diane Foley, whose son, US journalist James Foley, was murdered by Islamic State in Syria in 2014. In his latest novel, Twist (published on 6 March), an Irish journalist on a cable repair ship off the west coast of Africa is confronted by questions of environmental destruction, information overload and colonialism. McCann lives in New York with his wife Allison and their three children.
Undersea communications cables are underexplored in fiction. What prompted you to write about them?
In the early part of the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about the notion of repair, because things were shattering around us fairly frequently. Somewhere I fell upon the story of the Léon Thévenin, a cable repair ship out of South Africa. Like everybody else, I thought that [digital] information went up from our phones and hit these satellites and came back down. I was really taken by the notion that it all happens in the bottom of the deep black sea. Bizarrely, since I started writing it, undersea cables are now being cut left, right and centre – the Houthis in the Red Sea, the Russians and Chinese in the Baltic. We’re going to be talking about it a lot more in the years to come.
