When your award-winning debut novel is adapted into a Bafta-nominated TV series expectations run high for what might come next.

But Louise Kennedy, the author of Trespasses, seems unfazed with the daunting notion of what is often called second book syndrome.

Maybe it's her late entrance to the literary world, working in busy kitchens as a chef for decades or dealing with a cancer diagnosis that helps Kennedy cope with pressure.

Kennedy says she "could very easily never have written a word" and continued her career as a chef.

"I'm sure my life wouldn't have been thoroughly miserable" she adds with a half smile.

But in 2014, aged 47, a friend asked her to join a writing group.

"I had never written in my life. I had no ambition to write. It never entered my head."

At first it was short stories, then came Trespasses in 2022.

Set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland it was a story of cross-community forbidden love between a young Catholic teacher and a married Protestant barrister.

Kennedy's second novel is Stations, currently being serialised on BBC Radio 4, the reader meets Róisín and Red, following their friendship from rural Ireland to London, full of teenage angst, fragile friendships and the romance of escape.

"I knew that there were going to be readers for Stations, but I could only write the book that I wanted to write," she tells BBC News.

Their story starts in County Kildare in 1982 and follows them for the next 25 years as Róisín follows Red to London.

Kennedy describes her relationship with Róisín, as "unfinished business" as the lead character is the same unsympathetic teenage from her 2021 collections of short stories The End of the World is a Cul-de-sac.

Kennedy and her family left Northern Ireland when she was 12 in the 1970s and relocated to the Republic of Ireland where she found herself an outsider in a small, rural village.

"I was a very unpopular, awkward teenager but I'm a good mimic. I thought that all my problems in my new school would be solved if I spoke like everybody else. And I was able to change my accent over a weekend."

The decision to sacrifice her Belfast accent is something she regrets.

However, she explains that when she is writing her early life experiences resurface.

"When I speak, I sound like a free stater, but the voice in my head is really northern."

The parallels don't end there, as Kennedy, similar to the characters in Stations, also emigrated to England in the 1980s. However, Kennedy moved for economic reasons.

"Most of us went to London because you didn't have to get a visa. It was cheap and there was a huge network of people there.

"You always knew people, and there were always leads for getting a place in a squat or some horrible flat somewhere."

There are about 500,000 Irish-born people living in England today.

Since the 1930s, England has been the major focus for Irish migration, with big waves during the 1940s to the 1950s and the Irish recession of the 1980s.

However, Kennedy was keenly aware of the generation ahead of her who emigrated in the 1940s and 50s.

The women ending up in domestic roles or nursing and the men mostly labouring across building sites unable to settle.

She says "we weren't so different".

"We were better educated, but we had great expectations and great hopes for ourselves."

Last year, Trespasses was turned into a Channel 4 drama, starring Gillian Anderson and Lola Petticrew giving the story a "much longer and bigger life" than Kennedy ever anticipated.

So has Kennedy thought about where her new novel could go and who she would cast?

The short answer is, no.

"I kind of sat back a lot with that because I just thought it wouldn't be helpful for me to be asking loads of questions."

However, with a sly smile Kennedy confesses that her granny "would have been absolutely tickled pink to think of Gillian Anderson playing her".

In Trespasses, Gillian Anderson plays the character Gina, who has alcoholism and is the broken mother of Cushla, based on a version of Kennedy's grandmother.

"Even as a scruffy Gillian Anderson, she'd have been thrilled."

In 2019, Kennedy was diagnosed with melanoma skin cancer, which, over the following years progressed to further discoveries and a stage 4 diagnosis.

She googled everything - apart from her prognosis.

"I never asked. I never said 'how long have I got if these drugs don't work'," she says.

The drugs were successful and after eight months the cancer was gone but there are ongoing health challenges as a result.

She has previously praised Trespasses for enabling her to "largely ignore all the health stuff" as the writing of it Kennedy told The Times “got her through the first melanoma diagnosis, and its publication, sustained her through its return.

It's then not surprising that the acknowledgement in her new novel pays homage to the medical team who continue to look after her and "the legend who figured out how to use Chinese hamster ovary cells against melanoma".

"I owe you my life."

Kennedy never thought she would "earn any money from writing" but is glad it all worked out.

"I'm too old to be a chef. I'll be 60 next year, and my hips - was it Shakira who said that the hips don't lie?"

As Kennedy looks forward to the next three months of book promotion she says that everyone "should give anything they fancy a lash".

It seems like sound advice from the multi-award-winning author.