When Catherine Prasifka sits down with University Times to discuss her college years, she pieces together the formative moments that led her to where she is today.
Caught up amid a burgeoning career spurned forward by the success of her 2022 debut novel None of This Is Serious and her most recent work This Is How You Remember It (2024), Prasifka reflects on life as it is unfolding.
“I kind of feel like, at some point during the pandemic, I got on this rolling snowball, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”
Prasifka is currently able to live off her craft alone, something she knows is not granted to most creatives. Perhaps to get it out of the way, she soon reveals that she is already working on a new book: “Everyone, as soon as you have a book come out […] are like: ‘What’s next for Catherine?’”
Catherine Prasifka was named Trinity College Dublin’s 2024 Writer Fellow, which has alleviated both the creative and financial pressure of being a full-time writer. At the same time, she admits that “there is nothing worse than being like ‘You have to have an idea. You have to have an idea.’”
A returning motif in Prasifka’s novels is physical places as points of reference in life, and she is interested in depicting how both places and people change over time. On returning to Trinity as a professional writer after completing her B. A. in English Literature in 2018, Prasifka claims, smiling: “I feel like a big imposter.”
Her current role is markedly different from what she previously associated with the college; she is no longer simply going through the motions one step at a time. “It is not anything that has a certain ladder, and you are up a certain number of rungs on the ladder, and then you progress in a very linear fashion; […] creativity is something completely different.” While she only graduated six years ago, Prasifka recognises how those six years have transformed her sense of self. “You can never really know who you are when you are eighteen. Or maybe I felt […] I kind of knew who I was, but you only have so much of the developed self.”
She describes her teenage self as a “jack of all trades, master of none”, and though she has been writing stories since she was a child, a Single Honours degree in English Literature was not her obvious first choice. She considered pursuing a Joint Honours degree, or a “Two-Subject Moderatorship” as it was then called, but realised that she did not “want to miss out on half of English.” Coming to English Literature through genre fiction, her experience of third-level education was a “kind of push and pull” where, at first, she struggled to fit her interests into an academic context. “I do remember being a bit embarrassed when I was like 18 and in my first class, and people were like: ‘What is everyone’s favourite novel?’ And everyone was listing off these great works with these writers that I had heard of but never dared to open a book. […] Every class, I would change my answer to something that I thought was more serious.”
Eventually, she was able to come to terms with her literary interests, and she ended up writing her dissertation in the fantasy genre. “Returning to my love of fantasy is what kept me in the literary world.” While she feels like she had a sense of self upon starting college, she describes herself as “quite shy”, something that “college debating kind of beat out of [her] with a stick.”
She recalls how she was signed up for the Hist Maidens competition against her will, and for fear of “ruining the whole competition” she decided to participate, practising her speech eight times in front of her mother. She won the round. “All these roads have been leading to now because when you are a writer, they really want you to talk.” As a writer, it is not possible to just write. In addition to public speaking, Prasifka also points out how writers are pushed to participate in social media. She does not mind this too much but recognises that her relationship with social media directly relates to her self-image.
College was formative in getting her used to managing an online presence. “Everyone was online all the time.” While it allowed her to keep in touch with friends from other universities she had met through debating, she looks back on it with mixed emotions. “Because everything was so new at the time, it felt incredibly stressful.” Incorporating the internet into her novels came naturally to Prasifka, who felt like other authors were doing it a disservice by making it a big part of the story or otherwise ignoring it completely. As the internet is just a “fact of reality”, she believes it should be portrayed as such.
She admits that she only started taking her writing seriously after graduating. As a Writer Fellow, Prasifka has held creative writing workshops, but this is not something that she took advantage of as a student, citing a lack of confidence and feeling hesitant to share her work before she had perfected it. But she still holds that “the best way to learn how to write is to read very, very widely and to write yourself.” According to Prasifka, her English degree facilitated this, even if she believes “there is a difference between dissecting something critically and dissecting something creatively.”
Throughout her career, Catherine Prasifka has balanced academia and creative writing. After her B.A. at Trinity, she went on to pursue an MLitt in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow and an MA in Irish Folklore and Ethnology at University College Dublin. As humanities students are often told their degrees serve little purpose in today’s society, the prospect of graduating and finding a career may seem daunting for many. When asked about what she would tell other humanities students who feel uncertainty for the future, she poses a question in return: “What is academia for?”
She lets the question hang in the air for a moment before continuing: “I do not necessarily think academia is for getting you an incredibly high-paid career.”
She recognises that it is a luxury to be able to follow your interests and hope for the best, but she also believes that “most university degrees equip you with very similar things.” “What I have always done is follow what I am interested in, and one thing kind of leads to another.”
It is refreshing to hear Prasifka talk about her volunteer work with Fighting Words, a creative writing organisation aimed at children, as a fulfilling pastime rather than an activity to put on her CV. “What I was doing was investing in what I wanted and what I cared about.” Looking back, Prasifka thinks it is obvious that she ended up where she is today, but at the time, she did not look to the future with any specific goal in mind. “I probably would have been happy working in a bookshop or working in publishing […]. And I was hoping that I was just slowly, brick by brick, putting myself somewhere in that direction.”
