Your novel The Green Road has just been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize - which you won with The Gathering in 2007. How does it feel?
Well, it’s more fun the second time around! Actually, the first time I was really delighted, and sort of vindicated. But when it happened, I was working all the time to try and pay the bills, and it took a walloping two months out of my working life, I couldn’t write a damn thing, so that was a bit frightening.

At the start of the year, you also became the first ever laureate for Irish fiction...
The laureateship meant an awful lot more to me than any prize I got, because it happened at home. It takes Ireland a while to accept one of its writers, because there’s a very dissenting tradition in Irish writing. Writers are never telling wonderful stories about Ireland, they’re telling interesting stories about Ireland, and Ireland doesn’t necessarily appreciate that. So for me to be accepted, for a female voice – with all the anxiety there is about the female voice in Ireland – for that somehow to dissolve, and this symbolic thing of the laureateship, is just lovely.

What’s that anxiety about?
It’s wrong to accuse Irish men of misogyny, because they’re all so nice. So it’s difficult, but I do think the anxiety about the female voice comes very early; as in, it’s not actually sexualised anxiety. Irish men are more worried about their mothers than their girlfriends – and who wants to listen to their mother? It’s sensible, really.

In The Green Road, there’s a magnetic but also rather problematic mother - whose four children you follow to New York, Africa and over Ireland. Families are key to your work, aren’t they?
People say I write about the family all the time, but in fact I just put people into that shape, or use that shape to write about deeper truths. I was more interested in separation and connection, disconnection and love.

The story of leaving and returning - or not returning - that informs your novel runs through the history of Ireland…
Emigration has been a part of Irish life for hundreds of years, and my way into it was not through the nostalgia of the emigrants in London or Boston, because there’s quite a difficult relationship between the Irish person at home and the emigrant abroad; by the second or third generation, those emigrants turn Ireland into a certain kind of idea – which informs our own idea of Ireland, but also begins to kitschify it a little and sentimentalise it. All of that is difficult and above all else there’s an amount of shame swilling around all of that situation. The emigrants who left Ireland left because they were poor, and they left because there was nothing for them. The emigrants when I was growing up in the 80s, when I was a teenager, left not only because there weren’t any jobs, but because the moral atmosphere of the country was unbearably claustrophobic, and because in order to be themselves, they had to leave, in order to possess their own life. You had that feeling in the 80s that your life was elsewhere, that your real life was in New York or London, and not in this squabbling country that was always talking about goddamn contraception like it was the devil’s work.

You’ve had periods away, but never left entirely, have you?
I love Ireland. It is my home, but you know, I sometimes feel I have been trying to leave all my life, and never made it. But I don’t know if writers ever are properly in the place where they live, they’re always in a slight state of exile.

You grew up in Dublin, but The Green Road is centred in county Clare, on the west coast. Why was that?
I decided on the west coast of Ireland because it is so much about nostalgia and return, but I didn’t do a big sort of tweed-cap, paddywhackery job on that at all. It’s written in a town tradition, they’re small-town people.

Irish society has changed enormously, of course, and some of it very recently, hasn’t it?
Yes, rather triumphantly, the change was symbolised by a referendum for gay marriage, where people were so fed up of all this tired, fake morality of the Catholic church that they just said let people live their lives.

How profound a shift do you think it was?
All through my teenage life and beyond there was a disjunction between what was really happening in people’s lives and how it was reflected in the institutions and the laws of the country. So the change happened first, and then the laws changed afterwards. So yes, it is symbolic, but it is symbolic of the reality of how people are already living. It’s a confirmation; it’s been celebrated, not made.

Ireland has also been through a completely different seismic change - that of the financial crisis, which you wrote about in The Forgotten Waltz. What does the situation feel like now?
We lost a generation. The pain of austerity was astonishingly real, it is still being reflected in people’s bank accounts, people’s negative equity. The effect on the children of a generation of people whose bricks and mortar, such a treasured thing, became a source of astonishing stress, they became unreal to them, and the money became super-real.

Ireland has been held up, by some, as the country that did austerity successfully. That’s probably quite infuriating…
After all that stress to now sit up and wag our tails and say, “Aren’t we good? Pat us on the head”? I’m not that grateful.

You just don’t accept that “taking your medicine” version of events?
I resist that narrative. The bust was to an extent the ordinary mortgage holder, but overwhelmingly it was 20 or 30 billionaire property developers who put the hole in the Irish bank debt, and then the government took it on as a national debt. So this idea that Ireland had a huge party and then suffered a hangover and now we’re coming into a kind of judicious, adult sobriety, that annoys me entirely.

Anne Enright’s The Green Road is published by Jonathan Cape, £16.99. Click here to buy it for £12.99