Normal People author Sally Rooney accused of 'impeding peace' in Middle East ...

In the world of fiction writing, Sally Rooney's rise to fame has been meteoric - but not one she always welcomes.

The Irish author, 30, burst onto the scene in 2017 with her book Conversation with Friends - which earned her that year's Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

Her next book, Normal People, not only accelerated her success, it propelled her into becoming one of the most prominent millennial writers, selling over a million copies.

It was also adapted into an equally popular BBC drama, of the same name.

Consequently, there has been much anticipation for her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You. 

Announced in 2019 it was finally published last month.

But with success has brought a certain degree of controversy for the Irish author.

Born to a telecoms worker father and arts centre manager mother in County Mayo, Ireland, Rooney described herself as a 'loner' growing up.

But she found a voice while at university at Trinity College Dublin, where she studied English.

It was here she, in her third year, she was involved in a successful campaign to stop the BNP leader at the time, Nick Griffin, appearing at the debating society.

Speaking to the The Times in 2019, she described herself as 'a borderline controversially strong advocate of free speech' - even on hate speech.'

She said: 'I feel hesitant to allow the government power to legislate,' adding: 'I believe very strongly in the informal regulation of protests and no-platforming.'

A self-confessed Marxist, she has also been vocal about her industry. 

In a Youtube interview, named 'Writing with Marxism', she addressed her own concerns, addressed by one of her own characters in her book, that the books were a 'commodity' and that people were 'essentially paying to belong to a class of people who read books'.

Speaking about her own beliefs, she added: 'The way I see the world today is most through a Marxist framework. And I'm never quite sure how to make that way of thinking sit alongside the fiction that I write. I don't know what it means to write a Marxist role.

'Even though that's the analytical structure that helps me to make sense of the world around me, I can't necessarily can't always accommodate that structure in the form of a novel.

'The one way that influences my work is that I write a lot about social class, but I don't think there's a straightforward way of doing that.'

Controversy for Rooney first struck in 2017 after an interview in the Irish Independent in which she criticised prominent Irish Poet William Butler Yeats - the 1923 Nobel Prize-winner. 

'I hate Yeats,' she said. 'A lot of his poems are not very good but some are obviously okay. But how has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man?

'He was a huge fan of Mussolini, he was really into fascism, he believed deeply in the idea of a 'noble class' who are superior by birth to the plebs. And he was in the Senate.

'He wasn't just this harmless weirdo who wrote poetry. People misinterpret him in this country, and when we're taught about him in school, it's just hagiography.'

She later described her comments, just before the release of Conversations With Friends, as 'ill-advised'.

Along with addressing her Yeats 'controversy', Rooney has also in the past talked about her unhappy relationship with fame. 

In a Guardian article earlier this year she said the 'hell' of fame is that of a person 'enduring variably serious invasions of their privacy from the media, from obsessive fans, and from people motivated by obsessive hatred'.

She also revealed she had quit Twitter, having been unable to see things about herself.

She said: 'I don't read reviews or profiles, and back when I used social media, I actually 'muted' my own name to try and avoid seeing things accidentally.'