Lisa McInerney is an Irish novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, won the Baileys prize for fiction and the Desmond Elliott prize. Her new novel, The Blood Miracles, revisits the characters from her debut in a story that is vivid, compelling and moving.

Your protagonist, Ryan, is a drug dealer with hidden depths: a young man who, in a different social context, might have had a better life.
Yes, absolutely. For me, this is my background as well. I do need to stress I’m a working-class writer, so I’ve met a lot of people like that: who have made one stupid turn and found themselves fighting the consequences for years afterwards. People who are super-smart and very talented. I’ve known people who’ve done appalling things and the person who suffered most was them.

One of the things that comes across strongly in the novel is a sense of tribalism, and the loneliness of being outside a tribe.
Yes, the city [Cork] is thriving without these characters, and these characters are existing on the periphery. And it is lonely and disenfranchising. I think that the further out you are from any sense of society or tribe or family, the more likely you are to make extreme choices or make choices that harm you because you don’t have the wisdom of that collective telling you otherwise.

When The Glorious Heresies was published, there was talk about it being a “masculine” novel. What do you think was meant by that?
I still puzzle over this. I think it’s something to do with the swearing or the language? With The Glorious Heresies, I had all these themes which were very specific to women and motherhood. So is it the case that if you throw a few “fucks” in then it becomes a masculine novel? I don’t know.

Did it annoy you?
I don’t think it annoyed me, per se, as much as fascinated me. I think in people’s heads it’s a massive compliment. “Oh, look at you. You have escaped the confines of your gender. You have not written a domestic book.” I think they’re trying to be complimentary, they’re trying to say you’ve written something vibrant and tough. But if they thought The Glorious Heresies was masculine, wait until they get hold of this one!

You won both the Baileys women’s prize for fiction and the Desmond Elliott prize with your debut novel. Did that level of approbation change your relationship with writing?
It didn’t change the way I write, but certainly it has added another level of anxiety to the whole thing. This is where I hoped to be after a few novels. Now it’s happened already, have I set the bar too high for myself and are people going to expect Heresies 2 rather than The Blood Miracles? It’s funny, really. I should really be celebrating, but instead I’m too worried. Maybe that’s just me. I’m a very anxious person.

Your writing first got noticed through your blog. Was the blog a deliberate route to finding a publisher?
Absolutely. I started writing the blog in 2006 and, at the time, it was generally accepted that there was no way anyone was going to get published if they didn’t already have a platform. Blogging was really big in Ireland at the time, so I thought that if I can build up a body of work, at least I have one thing I can bring to a publisher.

Which writers have most influenced your own writing?
As a kid, Melvyn Burgess. As an adult, Hubert Selby Jr. If you want to write about grit and the darker aspect of reality – Selby wrote about people like that, but he wrote about them with such love and compassion, and that’s rare even now.

There have been a number of successful female Irish writers in the past few years: Mary Costello, Sara Baume, Eimear McBride. Why do you think your voices are resonating so strongly at the moment?
Irish fiction seems to be in a very healthy place. There are a lot of platforms to be published in Ireland: literary magazines and journals – some run entirely run by women – and independent publishers. It feels like if you write, you will find readers. And I think that allows for a lot of confidence.

• The Blood Miracles is published by John Murray (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.