My 2025: Seán Hewitt - "My best decision was to get chickens... I find I can spend hours with them and never check my phone, and never feel anything but at peace"

Your Hero of 2025?
The Muslim Sisters of Éire. In a year that has felt increasingly hideous for minorities in Ireland, full of divisive rhetoric, bleak late-capitalist inhumanity and right-wing anger, when homelessness numbers are rising and anti-migrant violence is stoked by idiots, they bring me and so many other people hope, and are a beacon of empathy and selflessness.

Villain of 2025?
All anti-trans campaigners. Sad, lonely, unimaginative, trapped in their own small bitter worlds, vituperative and emblematic of the worst of human ignorance. Villains, yes, but pitiable, intellectually unworthy villains who are afraid of being free.

Best personal moment?
I did have a novel, Open, Heaven, published this year, and it had such a brilliant reception, one that was beyond what I could have wished for. For me, finding readers and hearing from them always makes my day. On a very personal level, my best decision was to get chickens. They peck around the garden, snuggle under your coat, and I find I can spend hours with them and never check my phone, and never feel anything but at peace. May they live forever.

Best movie or TV show?
Two documentaries really stood out for me this year, both of them about educators resisting hostile politics. Mr Nobody Against Putin is a brilliant, sobering film made up of recorded footage inside a Russian school as propaganda directives come from the government, and the war in Ukraine begins to destroy families. The Librarians follows heroic school librarians in Texas and Florida, doing their best to resist batshit groups like “Moms for Liberty” and Ron deSantis and their vendetta against books.

Best record?
In terms of my favourite discovery, it might be Bronto by The Hidden Cameras. I love a heavy ‘80s beat. And a special mention for Big Thief’s ‘All Night All Day’, from Double Infinity, and Rosalía’s Lux.

Best book?
Sarah Perry’s Death Of An Ordinary Man. Stunning, beautiful, word perfect book about watching a loved one die. I haven’t read a book that articulated my own experience so closely and humanely before.

Best thing you saw online?
I’ve started to think that nothing online is good anymore. Endless flashing screens of drivel. My prediction is: the internet will be profoundly uncool in 2026.

Your hope for next year?
To write more, and allow myself to get distracted less. I have a book I’m making my way through, and I need to clear space for it.

What tickled your funny bone?
Giving grapes to my chickens and watching them absolutely lose their minds.

• Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt is out now via Penguin.