Writers for Repeal
It’s been quite a week in Ireland. After a sometimes divisive campaign, we voted, overwhelmingly to repeal the eighth, and put an end to years of sadness for Irish women, forced to leave their country to…
Mark O’Connell
The Irish journalist, Mark O’Connell, has been shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize – which is worth a whopping £30,000. Awarded for a book that engages with medicine, his debut, To Be a Machine, has already…
Beau Donnelly
In March 2015, Beau Donnelly, a young reporter with the Melbourne based newspaper, The Age, got a scoop. Friends of a wellness guru, Belle Gibson, told him they believed that the young woman was a fraud….
Louise O’Neill
When I first met the novelist Louise O’Neill in 2014, she had just released Only Ever Yours, her dystopian YA debut, and was reading in the Bantry Bookshop. Attending, I was impressed with her charm and…
Tara Westover
Following a dysfunctional childhood, Tara embraced education. In 2014, after ten years as an academic, she moved from Cambridge to London to write a memoir. But after concentrating on academic writing for ten years, she had…
Dervla McTiernan
As a child Dervla moved from Cork to Dublin, Limerick, and then to Galway where she spent her teens. A lawyer, she worked in Dublin before setting up practice in Oranmore at 26. “I worked for…
Rhiannon Navin
Brought up in Germany, Rhiannon moved to New York, when the advertising agency she worked for in Düsseldorf sent her there for four months. “I met my husband the first week I was there, and I…
Debut Roundup for March
Restless Souls by Dan Sheehan. Orion. When I’m sent a debut that’s been garlanded with advance praise, I tend to be a tad nervous; and when the book’s protagonists are young men who have lost their…
Emma Quigley
Emma loved writing in school, but she was more interested in film. After college, however, she turned to the world of IT, and has been working in that industry since. “I worked in Limerick, then moved…
Dan Sheehan
Dan Sheehan’s mother wanted her four children to study for an employable job; instead they chose the arts, with Dan’s youngest brother following him into a career in writing. This was, perhaps, inevitable. “There’s weren’t writers…
Mary Watson
Always a prolific reader, Mary wrote and illustrated her first book, aged five. She loved learning, and adored life at university. Studying Creative Writing in South Africa, under the tutelage of Andre Brink, she wrote a…
Patricia Gibney
Patricia’s first ambition was to be a journalist, but after school, she went into the civil service. “I started in the postal section of children’s allowance during Ireland’s longest postal strike in 1979. After three months…