Sally Rooney

I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.

I'm not totally comfortable with the ways in which our culture monetises art and literature.

I think it's best for me to kind of just plough on doing whatever interests me, just following my own whims, because otherwise, I would think, 'Oh well, I have to write something now that really represents my generation or that really represents young Irish people.'

I would rather do two things really, really, really well than do 16 things and have 14 of them fail.

Being shortlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize is, of course, a real honour for me and my work. When I wrote 'Conversations with Friends,' it was hard for me to imagine the book even finding readers - so it's a huge privilege to find it judged alongside such exciting and innovative new writing. I'm very grateful.

There are a lot of experimental novels that test the boundaries of what the novel is, and 'Conversations' is not one of those. It's conventional in its structure, even though its prose style and the themes it explores and the politics that underpin it, maybe, are on the experimental side. Its basic structure is pretty conventional.

I thought school was immensely boring, and as a teenager, I often found social life quite mystifying... I was not someone to whom it came easily to be charming.

One thing debating did was bring me in contact with a whole social world that I had never experienced before. It's sort of a very international, very niche hobby.

Class is something that I think seriously about and try to organise my politics around. I think there are lots of novels that don't really engage with questions of class at all, and they get less conversation about issues of social privilege than I do. But it's better to try and talk about it and maybe fail.

I think the debating thing actually helped to establish to me that being popular was completely worthless. I didn't enjoy the social dynamic and immediately left after becoming number one. But it felt like I needed to do it to know what it was like. It wasn't just that I was an aggressive person, although that probably is true to an extent.

Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there's a connection between you and the narrator.

In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also - philosophically, politically - I just feel like that's the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I'm not interested in human individuality; I don't even know what that means.