Sally Rooney and Kishani Widyaratna: Normal People

Sally Rooney breathes new life into fiction. Her novels deal with ordinary life in all its unexpected ways. The Guardian said of Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends: ‘It’s rare that a novel elicits such ferocious and unmitigated awe from just about everyone you know, whether male, female, or millennial’. Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (published by Faber & Faber last September), was called ‘superb . . . a tremendous read, full of insight and sweetness’ by Anne Enright. Olivia Laing has stated that ‘Rooney is the best young novelist – indeed one of the best novelists – I’ve read in years.’ On the occasion of the paperback publication of Normal People, Rooney was in conversation with Kishani Widyaratna, editor at Picador Books and contributing editor at The White Review.