Irish Novelist Sebastian Barry is no stranger to the American South. When he arrives in Oxford this month, he will enter a place that has occupied his imagination from thousands of miles away.
The South—and the complex history buried within it—has become familiar territory for Barry. His latest novel, The Newer World follows Tennyson Bouguereau, a formerly enslaved man from northwest Tennessee whose first years of freedom are marked by violence and displacement. After defending his home from a group of defeated Confederate rebels, Tennyson is forced to leave the land he and his sister, Rosalee, had hoped to make their own.
Barry’s fascination with the region is not simply historical. During an interview with The Local Voice, he described the South as a place where some of the questions that have occupied his writing for decades—memory, history, identity and, above all, courage—remain unusually visible.
“If you’re a writer interested in courage, maybe the South isn’t the worst place to be thinking about,” Barry said, “because it has been such a complicated history.”
History, for Barry, is compelling precisely because it refuses to produce simple heroes, villains, or narratives. Tennyson’s own journey is filled with such contradictions. After emancipation, he receives an education in Nashville and becomes a singer before eventually joining the Army. He is sent West, where he finds himself helping to take freedom from Native Americans after having only recently gained his own.
“That’s why I think we love history, isn’t it?” Barry said. “Because they’re so full of peculiar ironies and contradictions, largely because history is made by human beings and we are contradictory and complicated creatures, obviously.”
Those contradictions have occupied Barry for decades. He described The Newer World as part of a roughly 30-year literary project made up of interconnected books, some inspired by members of his own Irish family and particularly by the “renegades” and outsiders within it. His larger purpose, he said, has been to recover people from what he called the “cold realm of the past” and imaginatively return them to the “book of life.”
That same fascination with people pushed to the margins is central to Tennyson. Barry is particularly interested in those who are easily overlooked—the “quiet ones,” the “put-upon ones” and the “demoted ones”—rather than the powerful figures who traditionally dominate historical narratives. Tennyson embodies that fascination: through him, Barry explores both the darkness human beings are capable of inflicting on one another and the courage people can summon in response.
Barry’s interest in America’s darker history exists alongside a deep affection for the country. Growing up in Ireland, he said, American culture was so pervasive that American films became a kind of mythology for Irish children.
“We’re all in love with America,” Barry said. “When we’re kids, it isn’t, you know, the famous Irish heroic stories that we grow up on. Basically, our mythology is American films.”
But affection, for Barry, does not require looking away from the country’s contradictions.
“Being in love with something or even someone doesn’t mean you’re not interested in their deficits and the dark parts of their history,” Barry said. “Maybe it makes you more interested in those things.”
Barry hasn’t simply been writing about the antebellum and post-Civil War South from a distance. He has visited the United States numerous times—as a tourist, employee, writer, and researcher. During a 2024 trip, he visited six or seven plantations while researching the history that surrounds his fiction. At several of them, he said, he encountered conversations about how the history of slavery is remembered and presented, including claims that some information was being suppressed.
Oxford itself seems particularly suited to Barry’s interests. The town is celebrated for its literary culture, while its history is also inseparable from the racial conflicts that have shaped Mississippi and the South. Barry pointed in particular to James Meredith and the violence surrounding the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962, describing Meredith’s story as one of “enormous courage.”
Barry was particularly struck by the history of Rowan Oak, the antebellum home best known as William Faulkner‘s residence. Before Faulkner, the property belonged to Colonel Robert Sheegog, an Irish immigrant who came to Mississippi from Tennessee. To Barry, the Irish connection reminded him of an unfortunate truth: people who may be the victims in one chapter of history can become the villains in the story of others.
“Irish people generally have a sense of victimhood in history,” Barry said, “but that hasn’t prevented some of us from visiting horrors on others.”
It has taken Barry years of preparation and research to transform a complex history into fiction. Tennyson Bouguereau has occupied Barry’s thoughts for the last six or seven years as he worked to bring a character who had appeared in his previous novels fully to life.
“The more you read, the more likely you are to write your own book,” Barry said. “You have to find your own birdsong inside yourself.”
Barry will appear at Off Square Books in Oxford on Wednesday, September 23 at 5:30 pm, where he will discuss The Newer World.
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