From left, Dublin-born writers Anne Griffin, Sinead Gleeson and Ronan Hession and Irish Ambassador to Korea Michelle Winthrop take part in a book talk at the Seoul Metropolitan Library, Oct. 26, staged as part of the two-day Ireland Literature Festival Korea 2024. Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

The island of Ireland has 7 million people living on it. It's a small place that can be driven across in a matter of hours.

However, the Republic of Ireland — which makes up the majority of it — has produced numerous Nobel laureates and some of the world's most cherished novelists and playwrights, including James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. Today, a string of women writers, both established and emerging, like Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney, are also making a powerful mark on the global publishing scene.

So, what has led this country to become one of the world's most literature-rich hubs?

“Brilliant Irish writer Kevin Barry once said the reason there are so many writers in Ireland is because it rains 300 days of the year, and they're all inside writing books or reading them,” remarked Dublin-based Sinead Gleeson with a smile on Saturday evening at the Seoul Metropolitan Library.

Gleeson, the author of “Constellations: Reflections from Life,” a profound essay collection on body and womanhood that was translated into Korean this year, joined two other novelists from her home country — Anne Griffin and Ronan Hession — for a book talk held as part of the two-day Ireland Literature Festival Korea.

From left, the covers of Anne Griffin's "When All is Said" (Korean), Sinead Gleeson's "Constellations: Reflections from Life" (Korean) and Ronan Hession's "Ghost Mountain" / Courtesy of bokbokseoga, Adonis Books and Bluemoose Books

“If you look back at our culture and history, we have a tradition of bards and poets being taken seriously by the higher echelons of society,” she continued. “We're also a nation of storytellers. Even when we went through terrible times like the famine, poverty and British colonization, people would do what was called ‘ceilidh.' It's an Irish tradition of traveling to houses and telling stories.”

And much like once-colonized Korea, Ireland has undergone seismic sociocultural changes over the last 100 years — from its independence from the United Kingdom in 1921 to the sweeping forces of modernization and a gradual shift away from Catholic conservatism. These transformations have sparked a new wave of voices “coming out of a place of silence.”

“We were a suppressed nation. So much was kept inside; so much could not be said in public, so you just held on to your struggle inside,” said Griffin, whose novel “When All is Said” follows 84-year-old Maurice as he reflects on his life through a series of drinks. The story is a testament to the lives of older Irish men who raised families under challenging conditions yet were never taught it was acceptable to express their own feelings.

This silencing was both linguistic and cultural, according to Gleeson. In the 19th century, the country's national primary education system banned the teaching and speaking of Irish in schools. The Catholic Church's predominant influence further enforced the social silence, especially among women, as infamously witnessed in the Magdalene Laundries, where thousands of unmarried mothers and other “fallen women” were incarcerated to work to wash away their sins.

“There's a lot of repressed trauma that modern contemporary Ireland is still very much working through, and some of us do that in our writing,” she added.

Audience members attend a book talk at the Seoul Metropolitan Library, Oct. 26, held as part of the Ireland Literature Festival Korea 2024. Courtesy of Seoul Metropolitan Library

Hession observed that both Korea and Ireland appear similar in their histories, having moved beyond colonization and experienced intense modernization.

“In both Irish and Korean literature, you get this sense of what has been won and lost — people who have been left behind or marginalized, values that have changed, who is included in modernity and who is not. These are the kinds of questions that I think writers in both our countries are thinking about quite deeply.”

Another key factor that cemented Ireland's status as a literary powerhouse is the robust backing from its Arts Council, which offers systemic support to writers and numerous literary magazines through grants, bursaries and stipends. In addition, the government provides a tax exemption on writers' income up to 50,000 euros and currently runs a basic-income pilot scheme, awarding 325 euros per week to creative arts workers.

And, of course, there is the undeniable influence of a thriving reading culture.

“We have a strong reading culture. Writers are a subset of readers. So if you read deeply, if you read widely, you will have a rich literary culture,” Hession explained.