The Dublin writer’s Intermezzo is hotly anticipated by fans across the world Author Sally Rooney. Photo: Tony Gavin In April 2017, the annual Oxford Literary Festival hosted a panel discussion for first-time authors. One of the panellists was Paula Cocozza, a journalist at the Guardian, the other, a little-known 26-year-old author from Dublin by the name of Sally Rooney.
The following month, Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, was set to be released, having been sold in a competitive seven-way auction the previous year. But despite the battle to gain the rights to her debut I recall that only around 10 people showed up. Half of whom were publishers.
It is an experience many budding authors will relate to — and yet now, it is hard to believe that there was ever a time that Rooney was not a household name. Fast forward seven years, and in the run-up to this month’s release of her highly-anticipated fourth novel Intermezzo, Rooney has become ubiquitous in the literary world. Her incisive, deeply relatable portrayals of millennial life in her three novels, have accrued a fiercely dedicated fanbase of young, often female, readers, who see their lives refracted in her work.
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