Sara Baume

Sara Baume (born 1984) is an Irish novelist whose first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Irish Book Award for Newcomer of the Year, and the Kate O'Brien Award. In 2023 she was named on Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list.

Quotes

• I'm looking at the natural world all the time and trying to remind myself of how precious it is, it's still there, and these cycles are still going on. Because I think in ten or twenty years they won't be, things will be very different[.]
  • Interview with nb. Magazine, March 2023.

• I was born in a place I am not from and raised in a place I am not from and now I choose to live in a different place I am not from, and so in my writing I keep circling around this idea of how to be at home in a landscape as opposed to a community or, for that matter, a society or a nation.
  • Interview with The New Statesman, November 2022

• I have always known I’ll never have kids, and I’m lucky to be with a man who feels the same. And I don’t mind talking about it. I know that you sacrifice a great deal of joy as well if you have kids. Obviously having kids would bring happiness too. So it’s a balancing act between all those things.
  • Interview with the Irish Times, April 2022

• The Celtic Tiger definitely hurt Ireland from an ecological point of view – and on a societal level it brought out a nasty side of people’s nature, which impacted on the environment in turn – an obsession with property, and with ownership and one upmanship, with wealth and appearances.
  • Interview with Margarita Estévez-Saá, 2020.

• We lived mostly on the dole then, with a handful of crappy part-time jobs in-between, for five years, and it was during those years that both my novels were written. It was a hard, bleak period but it was also very simple and joyful at times, and I’m so grateful for that now. It sounds perhaps strange to say but if it wasn’t for the recession and all the opportunities that it removed from my life I doubt if I’d have felt the freedom, and perhaps also the despair, to pursue my writing.
  • Interview with Margarita Estévez-Saá, 2020.

• Everything he’s learned is from second-hand sources, as opposed to actually being around people and talking to them. He’s a strange man. And we see them all the time. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with their minds other than they’ve just been formed in a certain way.
  • Discussing the narrator of her first novel in an interview with Totally Dublin, March 2015.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015)

• I find it hard to picture some scrubbed-up stranger wielding my naked, squawking self about as though I were a broiled ham. Instead I like to pretend I was born all alone without any fuss, without any gore. And right here, in my father’s house. I like to believe the house itself gave birth to me, that I slithered down the chimney, fell ignobly into the fire grate and inhaled my first breath of cold, swirling ash.

• Everything is filled with stories, an old woman neighbour told me once, the same old woman neighbour, as it happens, who taught me to sew. This is when I was extremely little, too little to understand that most things don’t mean exactly what they seem, that meaning is a flighty thing. Because of what she said, I split the seam down the back of my favourite teddy, Mr Buddy, with a serrated kitchen knife. I was searching for stories, commanding words to tumble out and configure into horizontal lines like the ones inside my story books. Instead I found Mr Buddy was all stuffed with minute clouds.

Seven Steeples (2022)

• The clever rabbits understood that stillness was the simplest form of subterfuge. The stupid rabbits took off. On the undersides of their tails, white handkerchiefs of surrender had been pinned in order to betray them.

• A robin had claimed ownership of the fuchsia hedge that ran half the length of the east side of the driveway.
  It scaled the apical branch each dawn, and no matter the severity of the wind, it gripped on with its claws and trilled a melodious warning song — a beautiful, convoluted ballad about the murderous vengeance that would be exacted upon any bird who dared to trespass.
  The robin of the driveway had murdered in the past.
  It was prepared for murder.

• The panorama from the tip of the peninsula included a rock island a mile offshore. It was no more than a knoll but lofty and jagged, marked by a beam of light in the bottom centre — a gap that the dropping sun, on cloudless days, gleamed clear through — and on the through-gleaming days, they marvelled at the visible presence of the archway, at the brilliance of the absence at the rock knoll’s heart.
  If it wasn’t for the island, Sigh said, you wouldn’t even know there was a hole.

Quotes about Baume

• This book is a stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness.
  • Joseph O'Connor's review of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

• I had an image of all language standing to attention, eager to serve this writer.
  • Mary Costello on Spill Simmer Falter Wither