Malc’s Boy: Interview with Shaun Wilson

Anna Disley: Masculine violence runs through Malc’s Boy, as a source of pride, status and respect for the men in the story. The book explores whether violence is genetic or the result of circumstances, with Malc claiming he has ‘a bad gene’. How did writing the novel help you explore this question?

Shaun Wilson: I suppose that was a question I was always wrestling with in my younger days. A young man often emulates and seeks approval from his father, but what if he feels different by nature? I wanted this question to permeate the text, the tension between Shaun simultaneously feeling self-righteous, or that base animal urges were beneath him, to wondering if it was cowardice that was holding him back from following his father’s example (and perhaps the example of the state). I wanted to take care not to paint myself in a flattering light, as that, I feel, is one of the biggest pitfalls and challenges in life writing — it’s very tempting to present ourselves positively, as we tend to do in our day to day interactions. But I think that’s too predictable, and boring, and it comes off as dishonest. Most importantly it can compromise the artistic success of a work — putting one’s own agendas before the reader’s experience. I wanted my avatars, or the avatars representing myself, to be honest and true, but also ugly and shameful — that’s the only way the reader would feel that the book, although fiction, was an honest communication. I didn’t feel as though I could write about people acting questionably without going as hard on myself. To write about one’s life in a work of autofiction (in line with Doubrovsky’s definition of autofiction) is to lie, but to lie honestly, and that way you can communicate the truth more purely than with memoir, when you’re claiming that everything you say is true. The moment a person claims to tell the truth of their memories is the moment they lie, as memory is fallible. The form of Malc’s Boy, employing different avatars with their own planes of discourse, allowed me to explore the novel’s questions in a way that leaves them open for interpretation, rather than offering answers from my position as the author. 

AD: This book also deals with class, education and small town-ness. How do you see these factors intersecting with ideas of masculinity? Does toxic masculinity thrive where opportunity is absent? 

SW: I think that where people feel powerless, they are more likely to seek power through negative means, and to use violence for their own ends. When people are empowered, they are perhaps less likely to do so — law abiding citizens generally assume the violence of the state will protect their positions through upholding order and perpetuating existing hierarchies. Through equalising class cultures I wanted to pose questions to the reader about this, about the role of violence and power structures between classes — is violence or the threat of violence morally preferable in certain situations, when it is used legally, for example? What is our relationship to violence and how does it shape our cultures? A key hypothesis that runs through the book is that violence might be the ultimate resort of power, underlying and upholding the hierarchies of the human animal — it is of course an uncomfortable thought, but one that is very relevant to our times. 

AD: Malc’s Boy embodies a misogynistic culture; as Martine asks towards the end, where are all the women? There are some key women in Shaun’s life who he loves and respects, but we don’t hear much about them – the central relationship that is explored is with his father. Why did you choose to frame the story in this way? 

SW: When I started the book I had a key problem, and that was I knew my mother wouldn’t want to be represented in it. To overcome this problem I decided to tighten the focus so that the scenes would only feature Malc and Shaun. Then I decided to thematise that maternal absence and make it something transgressive that fit with the wider aesthetic — the absence of the mother would be reflective of wider female exclusion. As I discussed the novel-in-progress with Andrew Crumey, my PhD supervisor, I realised that the work demanded more than this — it couldn’t be written without at least mentioning the mother — and so I added Maria, as the mother of the often god-like narrator. This avatar features in the establishment of the sexual taboo in the mind of the young boy. Her cameo appearance also sees her as someone trying to avoid being ‘on camera’, with her main scene showing her using violence against the boy, which was meant as an equalisation of sorts. Then there are the scenes with the grandmother, and of course Martine, who confronts Shaun on behalf of the reader about the subject of female representation, among other things. To have written the book entirely without females or their love and influence would have been dishonest in itself, but as I felt unable to counterbalance the paternal with the maternal, mainly out of respect for my mother, the initial format with the thematisation of female exclusion largely remained. It is a book about violence, and as males are responsible for the vast majority of violence in the world, it made sense to focus the book on male characters and their behaviour. 

AD: Love is not in short supply in protagonist Shaun’s life. He loves his dad, and Malc loves his kids. But it seems that there are codes which Shaun and other men in the novel feel they have to adhere to, to earn love. Tell us more about what love means in the world of Malc’s Boy. 

SW: For the men in the novel love is perhaps expressed through caring, humour, loyalty, protection, and keeping one another in check. Love is something shown in spite of one’s better intellect — they act as though it is something that can be taken as weakness, or that can leave one vulnerable. But it is also the thing, I feel, that everybody wants deep down, no matter how much they might try to conceal it, and no matter the cost. From the outside looking in we might see that this is what Shaun, and even Malc to some degree, are always looking for, even if they don’t appear to see it themselves. Often we see the men masking their true feelings with machismo, or compensating for how rejection has made them feel, for example when Shaun attacks his love rival in the Kildare — his private thoughts as shared in his diary writing allows the reader to glimpse behind the facade of his masculinity. With Malc these contradictions are less apparent, but may still be detected when we sense that he isn’t being entirely honest with himself. Shaun in seeking his father’s approval is ultimately seeking his love, even though it leads to behaviour that is often ugly and self-destructive. 

AD: This is a novel whose form is hard to categorise – perhaps ‘experimental’ covers it. It uses a range of forms and techniques to serve its accessible and darkly funny narrative. Can you tell us more about this approach and why you chose it? 

SW: The novel is an attempt to communicate the truth of my experience of reality, as Shaun says towards the end of the book. This sense of reality, as I have experienced it, has been fluid and unstable, characterised by shifting states of mind and identity. In many ways it has been dreamlike, or experienced as a rush of dream fragments, fragments of memory and imagination, as well interludes of what we might label as reality. I wanted a form that would reflect this, and enable the reader to experience something of the immediacy of life itself — I wanted them to be wrong footed and not know what they would face or feel next. On the next page they might laugh, feel angry, sad or confused. In this way I wanted it to reflect something of the mystery and uncertainty of life. 

In the book we have different layers of truth (from apparently recorded scenes to imagined scenes), and a range of authorial avatars which vary in their degree of fictionality in relation to myself. These avatars of Shaun are protagonists, narrators and implied authors, which are constantly evolving and shifting in relation to one another and in relation to truth. The thought is that from the resulting layers of fiction (as long as that fiction was honest, more importantly than true), the reader might be able to gauge an overriding sense of truth from between those interpretative layers. 

AD: The novel itself is almost its own character, representing a means of escape and an opposition to the violent, often transactional relationships in Shaun’s life. Is that how you see it? What power do you find in storytelling? 

SW: The novel being its own character is a good way of putting it! Its story is told through a tapestry of threads which are spun as the various authorial avatars evolve and grow throughout the course of the novel, and the form of the novel also evolves as it progresses, giving the sense that as a creation it is also alive, growing and learning from its past incarnations. We see this evolution in the way the fragments come to develop into more fully formed ‘stories’ and sustain across a number of chapters, and in the way the attitude seems to change, for example with the inclusion of Martine and the more sensitively rendered Thai speech, and in the way the book’s literary influences come to flavour the style of Shaun-as-implied-author’s writing. Writing is part of Shaun’s true self, his hidden sensitivity and need to express himself artistically, which is in constant tension with the person he feels he has to be, or at least suspects in some way that he should be, in his father’s eyes. As Shaun develops his cultural capital he gathers power, whereas Malc lacks cultural capital but gains power through domination and violence — these different approaches to power run parallel, and Shaun traverses their boundaries as he finds himself conflicted between his father’s world and the culture of academia he is entering. I didn’t want to celebrate or prioritise one culture over the other, and I was careful not to cast any kind of judgement from an authorial perspective — I wanted the book to raise questions around that so the reader might engage with those questions themselves.

Purchase Malc’s Boy through our Bookshop affiliate link

Malc’s Boy is published on 23 April 2026 with Conduit Books, and we have three copies to give away!

Tell us what you’re reading on Instagram or Facebook using the hashtags #MalcsBoy and #NorthernBookshelf for a chance to win. Winners will be drawn on 13 April 2026.