After more than two decades working as a chemical engineer while being involved with many arts organistions in his spare time, Fergus Cronin is now exploring his own literary creativity and his debut collection of short stories, Night Music, has just been published by Galway’s Doire Press. Looking at human nature in all its complexity, it’s getting a great response. From Dublin, via Kilkenny and with deep roots in the West of Ireland, he does most of his writing in Connemara, where he revels in the peace and solitude, as he tells JUDY MURPHY.

Had he grown up in a different era, or even in a different family, Fergus Cronin might have followed an artistic career earlier in his life. But he didn’t and in his younger years, took a scientific route.

“I was good at maths and physics,” says the retired chemical engineer. “But I was good at English too,” he adds.

He still is – as his debut collection of short stories, Night Music, which has just been published by Galway’s Doire Press, proves.  Winner of the Maria Edgeworth Short Story Prize in 2022, it has been praised by leading writers including novelists Richard Ford and Joseph O’Connor. Ford described the book as “a stirring, artful and ultimately beautiful suite of stories”, while O’Connor praised the “fine lively collection”  for having the “juiciness of everyday speech and the nuance and insight of very strong storytelling”.

Fergus, whose father was from Ballinrobe and whose mother from Inchicore, grew up in Clontarf, “a relatively new middle class area of Dublin”, the oldest of two children. His father loved Gilbert and Sullivan but other than that, there was very little music around and no books or art. His love of literature, which began in his teens in the 1960s, was thanks to well-read school friends rather than the education system, he says.

Fergus can trace his long connections with Galway to his dad and childhood visits to the Galway Races. He also spent summer holidays in Ballinrobe and recalls happy days in The Neale where his cousins, the Farraghers, were farmers. Fergus has retained contact with them and reflects with sadness on the death of his cousin Marie in an accident last year.

“Those visits are what first connected me with Connemara,” says Fergus who now spends much of his time in North Connemara where he has a second home. It’s where he does much of his writing.

“I love the quietness and stillness and I love aloneness,” he says of his routine there. “I’m happy in company but in Connemara, I keep to myself. There are great people but I like being alone.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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