COVID-19 arrives in March of 2020 with a peculiar pause as society closes its doors. In Dublin, IADT student Chloe Michelle Howarth begins to pack her bags to head back to her family home in West Cork to quarantine. Somewhere within that still isolation, Howarth began to write a queer coming-of-age novel which will go on to sell 70,000 copies to date.

Now, from her home in Brighton, Chloe Michelle Howarth tells me a familiar story of her daily lockdown strolls within the 2-kilometre limits of her home. She remembers the cows, the rabbits, the hedgerows, how the sun hit the grass in a twinkling light. Howarth photographed the things she found alluring and typed up fragments detailing the most beautiful corners of the county that she loved so much. What began as excerpts in the notes app of her iPhone would soon become an integral part of her debut novel Sunburn.  

“My parents’ house in the country is truly in the most beautiful 2 kilometre radius, I wouldn’t ever want to leave. The Irish countryside is just so gorgeous. I was so lucky because it’s just very vast, very rural”. 

Eventually, these descriptions inspired Crossmore, a fictional rural Irish town and the roots of her acclaimed debut novel Sunburn. “Crossmore is kind of tapestry of the most beautiful parts of West Cork,” said Howarth, “I essentially just got to describe the nature of Ireland and put the beauty down on a page, which I could do forever.”

With two published novels and another set to release next summer, Howarth originally never expected to even pursue publication. Sunburn was initially a passion project without any pressures of publication.  

“The story just kind of spiralled away from me as I was writing it, and I think that’s the beauty of not having any audience at all in mind when you’re writing something because you can just be so creative. And then, eventually, you kind of look at it and you go, oh, this is all starting to form its own narrative!” 

Writing nuanced novels with sapphic themes comes quite easy to Howarth. But if the summer landscape gave Sunburn its setting, it was Howarth’s own familiarity with the theme that provided the story its emotional core. Queerness, she says, was never something that had to be intentionally inserted into her writing. It was simply there. 

They say to write what you know, and for this Cork-born queer author, “I knew I wanted to write a queer story, and I knew it was going to be set in the Irish countryside. It just wouldn’t feel natural to me to write a story that wasn’t centred around queer characters,” said Howarth. 

Photo credit: Emma Jones

Howarth’s bibliography moves backwards through Ireland’s queer history with Sunburn being set primarily in the 1990s, and her second novel Heap Earth Upon It retreating even further back to the 1960s. Howarth flourishes in rewriting sapphic romances into eras of criminalised homosexuality in Ireland.  

“The 90s was such a turbulent time for queer people but also such a hopeful time,” said Howarth, “I decided to start the real narrative of Sunburn during that time as homosexuality was only decriminalised in ’93.” 

Howarth suggests that in a small, rural town like Crossmore, the law doesn’t necessarily reflect social attitudes in such a confined community. Howarth “wanted to create this little village so far away from the rest of the world where these major things were happening globally for the queer community that weren’t really touching this conservative little place”. 

Take it back to the 60s and Howarth tells a story of gothic sapphic obsession and an elusive past in the fictional Irish town of Ballycrea. For Howarth, her debut novel had quite a sun-soaked and “nostalgic visual identity tied to the 90s”. In her second book, she moves further back in history to an alternative, darker, and more claustrophobic scene of religious repression and desire forced into the shadows of a heavily Catholic Ireland. 

Heap Earth Upon It explores the complexities of same sex attraction and the shame that accompanies it in a period of forbidden queerness. Particularly in historically conservative spaces, Howarth said she doesn’t “think there will ever be enough different forms of representation, we certainly do need a lot more queer media”.  

Queer people existed in Ireland all along, even when history left them on the sidelines in whispers and secrecy. In writing sapphic romance in historically Irish contexts, Howarth provides those erased lives somewhere to exist on a page. The now 30-year-old said that she “didn’t really search for queer media” in her youth. In West Cork, “such things didn’t exist at the time. I was just very sheltered, you know, it wasn’t out there. I wish there had just been more queerness, and I wish it had been more accessible,” said Howarth on the lack of queer fiction in her teenage years. 

Looking into the future of queer literature, Howarth “would like to see more gender, non-conforming characters, more transgender characters, and also the nuance of gender and sexuality as a whole”. 

“I want someone to explore the fact that it’s not such a black and white experience. There are a lot of fantastic trans writers in Ireland, and I want them to get more opportunities to tell their stories,” said Howarth. 

On her upcoming novel Aftertaste, which releases in June 2027, Howarth speaks about the aesthetics and themes featured in her third publication. “I’m glad you asked, I haven’t got to answer a lot of questions about the new book yet!” 

“I feel like this story isn’t as stuck into a specific visual, whereas I think my last two books were certainly very seasonal and visually tangible,” said Howarth, “I think it’s actually a very hopeful book in comparison to the others, the characters, regardless of what happens to them remain very hopeful. And that is all I can say for now”. 

From the quiet fields of West Cork to the fictional paths of Crossmore and Ballycrea, Howarth’s work to date has always merged Ireland, queerness, and history. For some, that is what makes the arrival of Aftertaste so intriguing. After two stories saturated in nostalgia, inhibition, and buried desire, Howarth simply describes her newest novel as hopeful. Although the details remain confidential, the message is clear: there are still queer stories waiting to be written and told, and Howarth holds a space for them to be heard.