Donal Ryan is most definitely ending the year on a high, having scooped the prestigious Novel of the Year gong at the recent An Post Irish Book Awards for his latest offering, Strange Flowers. It maintains a long-running hot streak for the 44-year-old Tipp author, who has twice been longlisted for the Booker, and who also won the Guardian First Book Award for his 2012 debut The Spinning Heart.

Strange Flowers tells the powerful and affecting story of Moll Gladney, a young woman who disappears from her home in ’70s rural Tipp, only to reappear five years later. As the story delves into the reasons behind Moll’s disappearance, Ryan also examines Irish life and society and that time.

Scooping one of the main prizes at the Irish Book Awards – which was voted for by readers – was the icing on the cake for a novel that had already enjoyed a very positive critical reception. More generally, how has Ryan found 2020?

“It’s been fine, I can’t complain really,” he replies. “It’s been so fucking horrific for so many people. Luckily, I’ve been insulated from most of the worst of it. Really, the only difference was that I wasn’t on the road very much with the book. Other than that, it was business as usual really. Writing is a fairly insular, isolated kind of profession anyway. It didn’t make too much difference to the writing, other than it went a bit slower for some reason – a common complaint for most people this year.”

With an unexplained disappearance setting up the narrative of Strange Flowers, Ryan was exploring the kind of haunting scenario we read about all too regularly in the news.

“It is a haunting idea,” he nods. “It’s embedded in all our imaginations as Irish people particularly, because of that spate of disappearances. I think of that a lot – how bloody horrific it must be for the families. But the manner of Moll’s disappearance in the book is kind of taken from a story I remember being told about my own parish. A neighbour of my grandparents, a really nice young guy in his twenties, came down and did some work for my grandmother one day.

“I remember being told the guy refused to take payment – I don’t know what he was doing for her exactly, it was something around their small little holding. My grandmother chased him back up the boreen to pay him, but he wouldn’t take the money off her, and the next day he went to England and was never heard of again.

“I often think about that, this guy who just disappeared off the face of the earth. A really nice, loving guy who was great with his family and everything – but what the hell happened to him? I couldn’t bear to write a book where someone disappears and their fate isn’t explained at the end. So I had to bring Moll back pretty quick.”

Does Ryan see her as a character who suffers because of the social attitudes of the era?

“I guess so,” he responds. “Obviously, in the mid-’70s, she wasn’t going to come out and say, this is what I am, because she hasn’t got that strength. You would have had to be very strong to make the declarations that Moll would have had to make, in order to live her own life in that place in the ’70s. So to leave and go somewhere cosmopolitan – somewhere she could be anonymous – made sense for her. That’s really it I guess.

“When you start to dig deeply into why a character’s a certain way – I mean, why is anyone who they are, really? Why are any of us the way we are? We’re not necessarily products of our environment: we’re born with a certain way of living, a certain way of seeing the world, and that’s informed by our environment and what happens to us. But you kind of are who you are, really.”

For those of us who remember back to the ’80s and further beyond in Ireland, there is a sense it was a more monochrome time before the technicolour ’90s arrived.

“Well, I was born in ‘76, so I grew up in the ’80s as well,” says Donal. “In my recollection, the difference between the ’80s and ’90s is stark. The world just seemed to open up in the ’90s – it seemed to get bigger and smaller at once, it was strange. The way we communicated changed drastically around the middle of the decade: in ’97/’98, every single person in the country, or the world it seemed, had a mobile phone. This communication revolution took place.

“But I mean, in the ’80s, I never try to describe a whole country, or to homogenise a group of people – you’re at nothing trying that. These are particular people. Maybe I’m just lucky enough to be from a very quiet, gentle place where most people seemed kind. I don’t remember experiencing the worst excesses of the theocracy that people suffered from. But again, I was insulated from it, I wasn’t in a position someone like Moll might have been.”

As Nabokov once opined, critics have a terrible habit of asking “What is the author trying to say?” I wonder how the current trend towards hyper-devoted fandom and author interactions on social media plays with those writers who simply want to let the work speak for itself.

“Yeah, to be honest, when I hear writers talking about their books, it fucking ruins the book for me!” laughs Donal. “I’m happy to do interviews, but I don’t really want to say to a reader, this is what I was thinking, this is what I want you to see, this is my message. The story just kind is the way it is. You read these reviews and they go into these complex concepts about literature, and they ascribe all these noble motivations I didn’t necessarily have. And sometimes it sounds great, and sometimes it’s a bit terrifying – you’re thinking, Jesus!”

In terms of formative influences, Ryan cites the likes of Roddy Doyle, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood, the latter of whom has enjoyed a real cultural moment in recent times thanks to the stellar TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale.

“My mum always bought Margaret Atwood books,” reflects Ryan. “She’s kind of a hero to writers, because she can do anything. She can do historical fiction, she can do sci-fi. She’s a poet and everything she writes just seems so right. It seems to have always existed, it’s amazing.”

After a brief chat about the best books Donal has read this year (“Stephen Sexton’s poetry collection If All The World And Love Were Young is a thing of immense beauty and power”), talk turns to 2021. Thankfully, news of a vaccine rollout means we end 2020 on a badly needed note of optimism. As for the idea of tackling the Covid era in fiction, Ryan says he’ll be giving it a wide berth for the foreseeable future.

“I have a novel written at the moment,” he notes. “There’s a draft ready to go into my editor in the next few weeks. The book is set in the present day; it’s clear it’s a guy narrating his life story in the current time. And I’m thinking, okay, I really should go back now and write in Covid, and have his neighbours calling in and wearing masks – and I can’t do it.

“I’m just gonna set it in 2019. I don’t think anyone would thank me for it, to be honest. I don’t think anyone wants to pick up a book of mine next year, or the year after, and read about masks and fucking quarantine and that kind of stuff.”

• Strange Flowers is out now, published by Lilliput Press.