PHOTO: Ruth Finnegan seated in her study, surrounded by books and manuscripts, reflecting her lifelong dedication to literature and research.
Bridging Scholarship Imagination And Auditory Wonder
Ruth Finnegan shares her insights on blending anthropology, oral literature, and fiction, revealing how sound, rhythm, and diverse cultural experiences shape her novels and scholarly works.
Ruth Finnegan is a writer whose work quietly bridges the realms of scholarship and imagination, crafting narratives that linger long after the final page. Whether exploring the elemental journeys of the Kate Pearl series or examining the intricate parallels between avian and human cultures in Birds and Humans: Who Are We?, she moves with a rare combination of intellectual rigour and lyrical sensibility. Her writing carries the echoes of Homeric rhythm, the resonances of oral storytelling, and the meticulous care of an anthropologist attentive to both sound and silence.
From an Irish childhood steeped in oral literature to a Quaker education that emphasised spoken word, Finnegan’s formative experiences instilled in her an acute awareness of performance and listening. These influences surface across her work, from the mystical undercurrents of Black Inked Pearl to the dreamy narration of The Little Angel novellas, where the auditory imagination shapes the very texture of the story. Her fiction is as much about what is heard as what is seen, blending narrative with a musicality that mirrors the rhythms of the world itself.
Her non-fiction, too, reflects this interdisciplinary curiosity. The Strange Tools of Human Communication: The Voice, the Pen, and the Lyre (2025) demonstrates her ongoing engagement with the ways humans—and even birds—create, convey, and transform meaning. Across decades of teaching, research, and keynote presentations, Finnegan has consistently sought to illuminate the profound connections between culture, language, and imagination, advocating for education that honours dialogue, diversity, and discovery.
Ruth Finnegan’s career is a testament to the beauty of bridging thought and feeling, scholarship and storytelling. Her advice to aspiring authors captures this ethos: listen, learn, and embrace the “I don’t know” as the starting point of curiosity. In every page she writes, there is an invitation to do more than read—to hear, to ponder, and ultimately, to understand more deeply the shared rhythms of human and natural worlds alike.
Your Kate Pearl romance novels (e.g. Pearl of the Seas, The Helix Pearl) echo Homeric rhythms – how do your classical studies shape these myth like narratives?
The Kate-Pearl series (The Black Inked Pearl, a journey of the soul; The Helix Pearl, the tale of the wine-dark garrulous sea; Pearl of the Wind; Fire Pearl, a tale of the burning way; Pearl in the deep wood; and the prequel Pearl of the Seas) are all – as so often in classical mythology – retellings of an age-old tale.
Each is about the struggles of mortal love – rejection then longing – interlaced with the eternity of space and time. Each volume looks at the story from a different perspective, told by a different narrator and invoking a different one of earth’s four elements: earth, water, air, fire and, finally (for the moment), the fifth element of Chinese philosophy: wood, where the voices of living vibrant trees are both obstacle and opportunity for Kate in fulfilling her destiny.
Behind all the volumes is, naturally, my own literary and linguistic experience. This is deeply influenced by my love for the sonic beauty of Greek and Latin literature, Homer above all. So whoever the ostensible narrator of each volume is supposed to be, the style of each is shaped by my own background, and, among other things, my conviction of the centrality of sound and rhythm in literary expression.
So the experiences of Kate and her mysterious lover are at times encapsulated in a series of Homeric-like similes, sometimes in direct translation (English is a poetic language too – think Shakespeare, Blake, Milton, Hopkins, Yeats), sometimes modelled anew on this rightly famous form. Both repetition and the recurrent epithets characterising Homer’s heroes are features of his epic style, up to a point reflected in the series. So too is the biblical tone in parts of the novel, echoing the nineteenth-century translations in which I first read – and in my mind heard – the resounding songs of Homer.
Black Inked Pearl draws on your Quaker schooling, Irish childhood and African oral storytelling – how did these influences converge in these mystical novels?
From all these I gained an awareness of the richness of both silence and sound. Both from my school (where I had to learn and repeat literary and biblical texts ALOUD) and in listening to Irish and African storytelling I learned to appreciate the reality of active multimodal performance as distinct from verbal text on a cold, non-dynamic, page. This insight – actually rather simple but too often overlooked – has informed all my academic, storytelling, and screen work.
Birds and Humans: Who are We? explores parallels between avian and human cultures – what discoveries surprised you most during its 2023 research?
Though I had an inkling at the start, I ended up immensely and surprisingly impressed by the incredible cleverness of some birds; by the things that we probably learned from them, like music, parental nurturing, home building, courtship, and navigation ( they were after all on earth millions of years before us and human beings are great imitators); and by the amazing parallels between human and avian life such as the making and use of tools, planning, intelligence and communication.
What is your most recent book?
My most recent and I think best nonfiction book is “The strange tools of human communication The voice, the pen, and the lyre” (Routledge, 2025 book). It carries on my evolving understanding of human ( and animal) communication , expressed in the three editions of my “Communicating”, and now here. For all of them I had to work so hard and – what I value most – learn so much.
The Little Angel novellas (e.g. Heaven’s Rocker) began as audio works – how did your anthropological interest in oral literature inform their dreamy narration?
Actually they began (again from dreams) as my first attempts at written fiction. But its true since, I think, my key sense tends to be auditory I always tended, even then, to hear them, if only with my inner ear. This has a long history behind it: growing up in oral-aware Ireland; my mother not letting me learn to read till I was seven so I could appreciate the other things in the world; my first serious reading being translations of Homer’s Odyssey into the sonorous language of the King James’ Bible; following my tutor’s advice and reading all my Latin and Greek set texts aloud; my continuing work on oral literature; and my lifelong joy in choral singing.
In Time to Learn From Africa, you challenge Western centric educational norms – what hopes do you have for cultural learning in schools?
I feel positive about this but I believe it must for the most part be about process rather than top-down product. Children in English schools today tend to come from heterogeneous linguistic,, religious, educational and class ( etc) backgrounds – what an opportunity fir educators. A really good project might be to get everyone to write or talk about their own backgrounds and discuss these, moderated but not dictated by the teacher. Then to repeat the process having heard others – because ( a basic anthropological principle) it is hard to have an open, receptive, mind let alone really understand your “own culture” until you’ve learned something about others’.
Finally, what is your top piece of advice for aspiring authors hoping to blend rigorous research with imaginative storytelling as you have?
I believe that the key thing is still, and always, the Socratic “ ‘I don’t know’ is the beginning of wisdom”: it’s the awareness of not-knowing that starts you trying to find out about something and then passionately want to communicate this. On the way it helps to read and learn from (but not slavishly copy) other books on the same-ish subject (also on different subjects, including “ popular” fiction: I’ve only recently realised how much I have learned from differing styles and approaches); above all remember your work is for your READERS, not you , so make it ACCESSIBLE; and, as I keep saying, LISTEN to your words for their sound, rhythm, simplicity, balance/alternation of long and short sections. After all good prose is a kind of poetry and needs to be lovingly relished and academic books as well as fiction need to tell a story.
