In One Life: The Bill Long Interview

‘There were two big influences in my childhood that made me want to become a writer’, he begins. One of these was ‘an alcoholic schoolteacher’, in Bill’s primary school in Waterford, who used to get Bill books to read: ‘It was very difficult to get books in the country at that time. I was born in ’32, so I’m now talking about [the late ’30s and early ’40s]. We didn’t have a county library then, and the National Library, they didn’t send a van around…’