Rowe Irvin: 'Joining the course gave me permission to take myself seriously as a writer'
BY Alessia Quaranta
4th Jun 2025
Rowe Irvin was a student on our Writing Your Novel – Six Months course in London in 2021. We caught up to discuss her debut novel, Life Cycle of a Moth – out now from Canongate Books.
Read on to discover the inspiration behind Rowe's debut, her advice for writers who want to create atmospheric settings, and her experience working with C&W agent Lucy Luck.
Rowe, you studied on our six-month Writing Your Novel course in 2021. How did studying with us impact your approach to writing?
I had never had any kind of formal instruction in writing before being accepted onto the course – I’d begun writing Life Cycle of a Moth a few years prior, and joining the course gave me some much-needed structure while also giving me permission to take myself seriously as a writer among other writers. Those feedback sessions were so valuable; I learned to see criticism as something positive which would help to make my work better, and I started to feel at home in my own voice and style.
Your debut novel follows a mother and daughter who live content and in complete isolation in a secluded woodland, until a red-haired stranger steps into the confines of their territory. Can you tell us a bit more about the inspiration behind it?
This book actually began life as a play – I started writing it while studying for my masters thesis on Samuel Beckett, and I was also reading works by Sarah Kane. There’s something in the work of both those playwrights that exists at a remove from the world and from society, but they’re still deeply involved with questions of what it means to be a person in the world, and human relationships. I began with this image of a mother and daughter, dancing, completely uninhibited, focused only on one another, as if nothing else existed beyond them. Gradually as I was writing, their surroundings began to fill out – first the hut, then the clearing, then the forest. I got to a point where I was mostly writing long passages of detailed descriptive stage directions, and I realised it needed to be a novel, to let me get inside the characters and understand why they are in this isolated situation.
The physical space of theatre still feels formative in my mind – the lit stage enclosed by darkness – and I think there are elements of that which remain in Life Cycle of a Moth – the known space of the hut and the surrounding forest, and the unknown space beyond its limit, from which the red-haired unknown emerges...
The natural world plays a key part in your story transcending the role of setting and becoming a character in itself. What type of research did you do to develop the setting for your novel? Do you have any advice for readers who are wanting to create an atmospheric setting of their own?
I grew up in rural Suffolk, and I continued to spend time in that landscape while writing the book. I was finishing my first draft of the novel when lockdown hit, and my brother and I both went back home to help my parents out, so I ended up spending those long months traipsing around woods and fields. At one point I found an abandoned rabbits’ warren which was littered with bones and rabbit skulls – I started collecting pieces of the natural world in a way I hadn’t done since I was a child. The sensory feel of those objects became very present for me in the writing, and they’re hugely important in the fabric of Daughter’s world.
I think when it comes to crafting atmospheric setting, what worked for me was physically spending time in environments that felt evocative of what I was trying to create on the page. Just being in those spaces, really inhabiting them, meant that I was paying attention to setting on the level of the body – the feel, smell and sound of a place.
Daughter is a fascinating character. Brought up away from everything in the isolated woodland, her life is a complex pattern of routine and ritual dictated by the changing of seasons, little discoveries and the need to forage to survive. What were the challenges in crafting a character with such a limited but unique worldview?
I had to consider what it would mean for a person’s sense of self to develop without society, without culture – or, rather, with the society and culture of only a single other person, her mother. There is a fascinating trope in folk tale tradition: ‘Child raised in ignorance of the world’. I wanted to delve into the implications of that for how the child might relate to both their own existence and their environment. For Daughter, this meant creating a frame of reference limited to her immediate experience of her forest home, and paying close attention to the sensations of the body. This is what informs her strange, sideways use of language, and her playfulness with words, which she pinches and wrangles to suit her meaning.
The main challenge was keeping an eye on how her mother’s own experiences would have an impact on her worldview. I thought about the stories parents tell to explain or conceal things about the world, how the element of male violence in the book would inform some of the choices Maya makes when raising Daughter, and in turn how those choices might influence Daughter’s experience of the world.
You’re represented by C&W literary agent Lucy Luck – how did you know that Lucy was the right agent for you? Do you have any tips for new writers approaching agents for the first time?
I had read an interview with Lucy (on this very blog!) in which she talked about how much she values a distinctive voice in what she reads. Voice is one of the most important things to me when writing, so I immediately felt a connection there, and Lucy also represents some of my favourite authors whose work has similar themes to my own. I think making sure an agent’s interests align with what you love about your own work is hugely important, and when approaching agents it’s good to be able to show those overlaps so they can see how you might fit within their list.
For most authors the journey from manuscript to finished copy is a remarkable one, filled with discoveries and perseverance. Reflecting on your own journey to publication, is there a moment that’ll stick with you?
So many! Signing with Lucy felt incredibly momentous, and also meeting my editor Leah and the team at Canongate for the first time and knowing straightaway that Life Cycle of a Moth would be completely at home with them. And holding the finished book was (and continues to be) very surreal – I’m still getting used to the idea of it existing as an object in the world.
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I’ve got a stack of short stories that I’m hoping to do something with – beyond that I’m just exploring and enjoying finding new ways of pushing the possibilities of language and voice.
Get your hands on a copy of Life Cycle of a Moth.
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