Jennifer Johnston published her award-winning first novel, The Captains and the Kings, in 1972. She was 42. Making up for what might have looked like a late start, she has written 17 novels since – including her most famous, How Many Miles To Babylon, in 1974 – as well as several plays and short stories. A new novel Naming the Stars is published on e-book this month and in print in 2016. Her fiction charts the crisscrossing of private lives and public events the length and breadth of 20th century Ireland, unearthing flawed characters and family secrets, often in the Big House, often against a backdrop of war. Jennifer Johnston tells John Kelly about growing up in a well-known Dublin family – her father was the playwright Denis Johnston and her mother the actor and producer Shelah Richards – and about living in Derry since the 1970s until recently, writing with bombs going off around her and at one time working with paramilitary prisoners on both sides.