Still hoping for the approbation of his people

His latest novel has made the Booker Prize shortlist. But life, and literature, hasn't always been so kind to Sebastian Barry. By Colin Murphy. Photograph by Derek Speirs

As plays go, it's not a bad plot... An unknown writer achieves international acclaim with a new play. A famous actor powers it with a mammoth performance, and the writer and actor become good friends.

Then the actor becomes ill, and dies. The writer can't take it, and becomes delusional, blaming himself, fantasising that he could have kept the actor alive. He has a breakdown. A psychiatrist friend comes to his aid: writing will help the healing, he says.

The writer starts to work again. Trying to heal not just the pain of his friend's death, but also older, buried family hurts, he finds an allegory for his father in the leading political figure of the day. He writes a play about his father, in the guise of the politician.

The play is taken on by a leading director, and backed by the national theatre. On the opening night, the country's most influential theatre critic calls it "unmissable".

But other critics dislike it. One calls it "moronic". There is a media circus. The writer feels betrayed by his country, and considers fleeing. Instead, again, he pours the hurt into his writing, and writes a novel. It wins the Booker prize.

The plot is the story of last ten years of Sebastian Barry's life – up to the point where he wins the Booker. That scene will be played out on 10 October, when Barry's Word War I novel, A Long Long Way goes up against work by John Banville, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ali Smith for literature's most prestigious prize – the Oscars of books, as Barry himself has called it. (The Booker's £50,000 prize is not literature's most lucrative, but the book sales that its prestige brings makes it the most valuable. An additional 18,000 copies of A Long Long Way have been printed since it made the Booker shortlist.)

Fifty years old just a few weeks ago – though he could pass for ten years younger – Barry reckons wryly he has "just about reached early adulthood". He first work was published in his late twenties – two novels, a children's book and a collection of poetry, and he first achieved recognition with his 1988 second play, Boss Grady's Boys, which was staged at the Peacock and won him the first BBC/Stewart Parker Award.

Boss Grady's Boys was the first in what would become a 17-year, seven-play cycle of plays about Barry's family and its history. Artistically, this culminated in 1995's The Steward of Christendom, the play that sent Barry, and Donal McCann in the lead role, around the world, garnering awards and huge critical and popular acclaim ("magnificent", The New York Times' Ben Brantley found it). But the cycle was only concluded with 2002's Hinterland, the play that threatened to destroy his career and reputation.

Part of the reason he took the negative reaction to Hinterland so badly, Barry says, was that he had instead expected the reverse – he had just completed 17 years of work, and thought this in itself might achieve some recognition. Instead, he was pilloried by the critics and pulverised by the media. Four months later, at the famous Hay festival in England, he said, "I felt that I didn't know my own country. I felt like I had suddenly been disproved, that I no longer understood the place... After going through the fire of Dublin, I felt desperate". Reported by The Guardian, his remarks had him back on the front pages the next day, and fodder for the letters pages once again.

The curious thing is that the overall critical response to Hinterland was not so negative; it did good business in the regional repertory theatres in England to which it toured, and not badly at the Abbey. Fintan O'Toole, in his opening night review in The Irish Times, found it "deeply flawed but utterly compelling". "It is hard to thing of a piece that is at once so problematic and so unmissable", he wrote. (He still stands over that review, and thinks the play was "better than it appeared" and that the "production didn't make the most of the possibilities".) Audiences and critics in Manchester and Liverpool warmed to it. In London, most of the key reviews were lukewarm, though the Daily Mail thought it "serious, funny and impassioned" and "a fine new play".

Back in Dublin, in an unusual – though not unprecedented – move, The Irish Times published a second review of the play, this time by literary critic Eileen Battersby. Battersby found Hinterland to be "a vulgar travesty", "silly trash", "a sloppy farce" of "moronic obviousness". And "far worse than that", she wrote, it was "bad manners".

The problem was less artistic than political. Barry's play was about a disgraced Irish elder statesman facing a tribunal on charges of corruption. Max Stafford Clark, a leading English director of new work, staged it naturalistically, and Patrick Malahide played the lead role in a Dermot Morgan-esque impersonation of Charles Haughey. The play was seen as an intrusion, and a clumsy and crude one, into the private life of a man retired and ill.

Ironically, Barry had already spent six plays worrying about their possible impact upon individuals and fearing being intrusive and hurtful, as he wrote about characters from his family's history. He had anticipated that as his cycle approached the present day, and his own generation of the family, it would get more difficult, he says. And so, when he reached the final play, he sought an allegory for his family situation. There were difficulties there, and illness, which he still won't talk about: instead he looked around, and found, in the drama around Charles Haughey, something analogous to the situation in his own family.

But there is something cathartic in crisis. He had originally intended never to do Hinterland in Dublin, but somewhere along the way that advice got lost, he says. But going to London, they hoped the play would be rescued by a critical view untempered by narrow political concerns. It wasn't to be. Yet the morning the reviews came out, he found himself walking thruogh London to meet his agent, almost perfectly happy. If he had been on a pedastal since the success of The Steward of Christendom, he was now firmly off it (so much so that one critic presumed he would never write again). It was liberating.

Barry lives simply, in a restored rectory deep in south Wicklow. Though, both he and his wife, Alison Deegan – who acted in his 1990 play, Prayers of Sherkin, and is now a writer in her own right, working on a screenplay for Alan Rickman – are from Dublin, where they were tenants for a time of David Norris, in his Georgian pile on North Great George's St. Barry dislikes modern urban life. Success provoked more upheaval than failure: after the Steward, they moved house three times; after Hinterland, he spent two years working on the restoration of their now home with a team of builders. "I think that's what people were designed for", he says of the labour. They each have a study, and break up the writing day with mountain walks. "To be woken up by the blast of birds in the morning... That's what life is supposed to be."

The three children go to the local schools, with the twins, aged 12, having just started at secondary school ("I didn't know it was such a big deal", he says, "but it is".)

Barry's day starts with the hour round trip on the school run, then emails and phone calls at his desk – publishers tend to do their correspondence first thing in the morning or late in the afternoon. When writing, he likes to be able to walk out of the study, into the garden.

He has never had a proper job. After college, he sent off two applications – one, like many an arts graduate before and since, to Hanna's bookshop, another, bizarrely, to the Foreign Exchange department at the bank. He can't remember why the latter, though they wrote him "the nicest letter", explaining he was possibly "the least suitable candidate" they'd ever had for the job. Hanna's didn't even reply. That was the mid- 1970s, and nobody was getting work.

"The year you left college, there'd be literally none of your class left a year later." He calls this another "forgotten generation". "There are people from seventies Ireland all over the world."

So he travelled. You could live in Greece for about £1,000 for a year at the time, and he was back and forth for those years. He quotes Patrick Kavanagh: "I dabbled in poetry and found it was my life". Life, at that time, forced you to dabble – and he, too, found his life in writing.

Had he not been a writer, he speculates, he would have been a builder. The rhythm of it, the solidarity, the backbreaking physical exercise, the shared humour. As a career writer, he had never known the company of men in work until he joined them working on his house. Those men provided the model for the men with whom he went into the trenches during the 15 months writing A Long Long Way. He speaks about those men with tenderness, and respect touching on awe, laced with disgust at how they were airbrushed from history – 800 of them killed on one day in the week of the 1916 Rising, in one gas attack, and left out of the history books.

He told the Sunday Times previously: "At heart, no matter how international and cosmopolitan a people we have become, you are still hoping for the proud handshake of your father and the approbation of your people". But now, he is looking for that approbation for the men who allowed him to write their stories, the Irishmen who died in the trenches and no man's land of World War I. Once he had found his characters in the initial writing, he just followed them, he says, into the trenches and no man's land, hoping they'd make it through. It's barely his novel, in fact: "The people in the book are the authors of the book". He is not shy to admit that the Booker means a lot to him – but first and foremost, it means getting his book, and their story, into many more hands. That he's now working on a screenplay of the book for Noel Pearson can't hurt, either.p