SOURCE: Doyle, Roddy, and Colin Lacey. “Roddy Doyle: Ruffling Feathers, after a Booker.” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 13 (25 March 1996): 55-6.

In the following interview, Doyle discusses the controversy surrounding his television mini-series Family, his novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors, and his affinity for writing new novels featuring characters from previous works.

Given Ireland's pride in its artists, it's an alarming and bizarrely incongruous vision: Roddy Doyle, author of the 1993 Booker Prize winner, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, successful screenwriter and one of the country's most popular contemporary novelists, slips furtively through the streets of his native Dublin, anxious to avoid the remote but worrying prospect of physical attack from a seriously aggrieved public.

The first episode of Family, a harrowing, four-part television drama scripted by Doyle that graphically probes domestic violence and spousal abuse in a working-class Irish household, aired on national television in the summer of 1994, causing...