Garry Hynes

The English playwrights of the '50s and '60s didn't really keep writing or getting produced, while the Irish did. There's encouragement for the younger ones also in the fact that Ireland is exceptional in its ability to make theater part of the national dialogue, and it reaches to all four corners of the country.

I still get called 'a stick of dynamite' or 'pint-sized dynamo,' stuff like that. Actually, I was too busy to notice there was anything unusual about being a woman director until the early 1980s, when I looked around the professional theater and realized there weren't many of us. You have to make more of a case for yourself than any man.

My grandma actually put me in girdles when I was around nine or ten because I had hips even then, and she didn't want boys to be attracted to me. Having hips meant you were a full-grown woman, and I was too young for that.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.