Tragic Balladry in the Wild West: Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter

Maebh Long - Kevin Barry fan and Eamon Cleary Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Otago - joins Chris to discuss The Heart in Winter. Barry's tale of lovers on the run is set in the American midwest in 1891 but looks back to Irish folkloric figures like Deirdre of the Sorrows. As Chris and Maebh discuss, Barry gives us a more agentive figure than the folkloric models in Polly Gillespie, the more streetwise character. If this makes Polly more modern, and even feminist, than the old Irish stories, the novel also looks to our own time in its language: Barry puts twenty-first century speech in his characters' mouths rather than the language of 1891. The Heart in Winter is a deceptive novel: it has a straightforward plot but a rich texture, and an exploration of melancholic desire that is also playful in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien.

Read the accompanying blog post at https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com/2026/06/dark-balladry-in-wild-west-kevin-barrys.html

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