Rooney was born in Castlebar, County Mayo,[5] in 1991, where she also grew up[6] and lives today, after studying in Dublin and a stint in New York City.[7] Her father, Kieran Rooney, worked for Telecom Éireann and her mother, Marie Farrell, ran an arts centre.[6][8][9] Rooney has an older brother and a younger sister.[6] She studied English at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where she was elected a scholar in 2011.[10] She started (but did not complete) a master's degree in politics there, completing a degree in American literature instead, and graduated with an MA in 2013.[11]
While attending Trinity College Dublin, Rooney was a university debater and eventually became the top debater at the European Universities Debating Championships in 2013,[12][13] later writing of the experience.[14] Before becoming a writer, she worked for a restaurant in an administrative role.[15][16]
Career
Early career
Rooney completed her first novel—which she has called "absolute trash"—at age 15.[17] Her first published works were two poems in The Stinging Fly, submitted to the magazine when she was in secondary school.[18] She began writing "constantly" in late 2014. She completed her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, while studying for her master's degree in American literature. She wrote 100,000 words of the book in three months.[17]
In 2015, her essay "Even If You Beat Me", about her time as the "top competitive debater on the continent of Europe", was seen by an agent, Tracy Bohan, of the Wylie Agency, and Bohan contacted Rooney. Rooney gave Bohan a manuscript, and Bohan circulated it to publishers, receiving seven bids.[9][19][20]
She had seen my story and wondered whether I had anything else she could read... But I didn’t send her anything for ages... I don’t know why. I didn't want her to see this shoddy draft.[15]
Rooney signed with Tracy Bohan of the Wylie Agency, and Conversations with Friends was subject to a seven-party auction for its publishing rights, which were eventually sold in 12 countries.[21][15] The novel was published in June 2017 by Faber and Faber. It was nominated for the 2018 Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize,[22] and the 2018 Folio Prize, and won the 2017 Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award.[23][24]
In March 2017, her short story "Mr Salary" was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.[25] In November 2017, Rooney was announced as editor of the Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly.[26] She was a contributing writer to the magazine.[27] She oversaw the magazine's two issues in 2018, before handing the editorship over to Danny Denton. She remains a contributing editor to the magazine.[28]
Rooney's second novel, Normal People, was published in September 2018, also by Faber and Faber.[30][31] The novel grew out of Rooney's exploration of the history between the two main characters of her short story "At the Clinic", which was first published in London-based literary magazine The White Review in 2016.[32][33] In July 2018, Normal People was longlisted for that year's Man Booker Prize.[34] On 27 November 2018, the work won "Irish Novel of the Year" at the Irish Book Awards[35] and was named Waterstones' Book of the Year for 2018.[36] In January 2019, it won the Costa Book Award (formerly the Whitbread) for the Novel category.[37][38] It was longlisted for the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize[39] and the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.[40] It has been translated into 46 languages and earned praise from Barack Obama and Taylor Swift, among others.[7]
In April 2019, the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers announced its 2019 class of fellows, which included Rooney. The press release stated, "she will be writing a new novel under the working title Beautiful World, Where Are You, examining aesthetics and political crisis."[47] The novel was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and by Faber in the UK and Ireland in September 2021.[48][49][50]
Rooney has said that her work has a Marxist character.[55] Some literary critics have criticised this aspect: Madeleine Schwartz of The New York Review of Books has said of Rooney's works that "the politics are mostly gestural";[56] Becca Rothfeld of the literary magazine The Point wrote that Rooney's Marxism is no more than "fashionable posturing" and called her work "sanctimony literature" that is "full of self-promotion and the airing of performatively righteous opinions".[56] Cody Delistraty, writing for Vulture, has unfavourably compared the anti-capitalist politics of Rooney's work to contemporary novelists such as Halle Butler, Tony Tulathimutte, and Ling Ma, opining that Rooney's characters ultimately simply accept the capitalist status quo rather than challenging it.[57]
Some critics mocked the ending of Normal People, in which the working-class Connell immigrates to New York City to begin a creative writing course at New York University, as a "bourgeois" fantasy.[58] Rooney retorted that those critics misunderstand class dynamics:
From the Marxist point of view, people who work for a living rather than making money from capital are workers, members of the working class. But in contemporary colloquial use, the term "working class" is used much more restrictively, applied only to particular communities or workers in particular industries. These uses of the term are really not interchangeable at all. They mean very different things. So of course, when we try to talk about class using this terminology, we run into confusion and disagreement.[58]
The feminist themes in Rooney's works have made them popular in China, where they are considered best sellers.[59][60]
Rooney declined an offer from an Israeli publisher to translate Beautiful World, Where Are You into Hebrew, citing her support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.[62][63] In October 2021, she said, "The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement's institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so".[64] In retaliation, two Israeli bookshop chains announced a withdrawal of all of Rooney's titles from their shelves in early November.[65] Rooney's Israeli publisher said it would continue selling her titles.[66] Subsequently, in a letter organized by Artists for Palestine UK, 70 writers and publishers, including Kevin Barry, Rachel Kushner, Geoff Dyer, Pankaj Mishra, Carmen Callil, and Ahdaf Soueif, said they supported Rooney’s decision.[67]
This audiobook contains unabridged readings of the stories "Mr Salary" and "Color and Light", previously published in Granta and The New Yorker, respectively.
Eakin, Emily (12 February 2020). "He Courted Me Through My Favorite Novel". The New York Times. Consider Sally Rooney's 2017 'Conversations With Friends,' widely heralded as the first great novel of millennial life.
Sheahan, Fionná (23 May 2020). "It's Marianne's fault we can't get a government to satisfy Normal People". Irish Independent. Retrieved 23 May 2020. The author of Normal People is a self-professed Marxist... her politics seeps through her writing. It's no accident the central protagonists of the book that has captured the nation's imagination are the rich girl living in the mansion and the poor boy whose mother works as her family's cleaner. The TV version glosses over the discussions around 'The Communist Manifesto' and the feminist bible 'The Golden Notebook'.
^ abcBeckerman, Hannah; Clark, Alex; O'Keeffe, Alice; Kellaway, Kate; Sethi, Anita; Lewis, Tim; Parkinson, Hannah Jane; Cross, Stephanie; O'Kelly, Lisa (22 January 2017). "Meet the new faces of fiction for 2017 | Books". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 May 2020.
^Sheahan, Fionnán (23 May 2020). "It's Marianne's fault we can't get a government to satisfy Normal People". Irish Independent. Retrieved 23 May 2020. The author of Normal People is a self-professed Marxist... her politics seeps through her writing. It's no accident the central protagonists of the book that has captured the nation's imagination are the rich girl living in the mansion and the poor boy whose mother works as her family's cleaner. The TV version glosses over the discussions around 'The Communist Manifesto' and the feminist bible 'The Golden Notebook'.
^Collins, Lauren (31 December 2019). "Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head". The New Yorker. Retrieved 24 February 2023. [Rooney's parents] took Sally and her two siblings to church, but they were more passionate about passing on socialist values. Marx's dictum 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' was the household catechism.
^Tschemerinsky, Kathrine (26 June 2021). "Writer Sally Rooney on transforming life into novels". Retrieved 24 February 2023. Sally Rooney explains that she sees the world through what she calls a Marxist framework and that both of her novels explore social structures: 'When there are two people alone in a bedroom no one is thinking about class and gender, but the structures are there,' she says. Rooney's books also discuss social class through her characters: 'The people that I write about tend to be precariously situated in the economy. They are usually college educated like I am, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are financially stable and secure.'
^ abBrockes, Emma (3 September 2021). "Sally Rooney interview: 'It's my job to write about whatever comes into my head'". Irish Examiner. Retrieved 24 February 2023. As Rooney's fame grew, inevitably commentators online targeted her own background for being insufficiently pure. At the end of Normal People, Connell, a working-class boy, goes off to New York to take up a place on a creative writing course at NYU, an ending mocked by critics as being bourgeois.
