Sally Rooney has been proclaimed the voice of a generation. She is the Irish author of two wildly, in literary terms, successful novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2019), the latter of which has just been adapted into a television series by the BBC.

But for Rooney herself the story is less simply generational. Much to the chagrin of Guardian columnists, she speaks quite openly about how the novel deals with class and capitalism:

It would have been really difficult for me to write about young people leaving home in the west of Ireland, moving to college, and not confront the economic disparities that were emerging at that time, like the stripping back of protections for people from working-class backgrounds who were going to college.