In April 2017, the annual Oxford Literary Festival hosted a panel discussion for first-time authors. One of the panelists was Paula Cocozza, a journalist at the Guardian, the other, a little-known 26-year-old author from Dublin by the name of Sally Rooney. The following month, Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, was set to be released, having been sold in a competitive seven-way auction the previous year. But despite the battle to gain the rights to her debut, this paper’s culture editor, who interviewed the pair at the event, recalls that only around ten people showed up. Half of whom were publishers.
It is an experience many budding authors will relate to — and yet now, it is hard to believe that there was ever a time that Rooney was not a household name. Fast forward seven years, and in the run-up to this month’s release of her highly-anticipated fourth novel Intermezzo, Rooney has become ubiquitous in the literary world. Her incisive, deeply relatable portrayals of millennial life in her three novels, have accrued her a fiercely dedicated fanbase of young, often female, readers, who see their lives refracted in her work.
