Pat Marry
Pat has wanted to be a Garda since he encountered one, aged 8. He applied at 17. “They said, ‘you’re too skinny, go and get flesh on your bones – and you have to be 18…
Jed Lynch
Jed has always been involved in something creative. “I was the youngest of 7 children. The house was full of books. I read all kinds of stuff; everything from The Mallory Towers, to Nietzsche.” There was…
Elizabeth MacDonald
Elizabeth’s first love was music. She studied piano from aged 6 at The College of Music, and she loved singing, but not performing. “I couldn’t do it. I felt as if I was getting a heart…
Review. Night Swimming by Doreen Finn.
It’s Dublin, 1976, the summer of the heatwave, and at nine years old, Megan is happy. She hangs out with her next-door neighbour, Daniel, whilst her talented mother, Gemma, spends her days painting in the attic….
Alex Barclay
Alex Barclay hasn’t had a holiday in six years. And for the past two years she has been on a writing lockdown. Never a stranger to hard work, she has taken on a particularly large burden…
Helena Duggan
Helena wrote a lot as a small child, but at secondary school, she was discouraged because she wasn’t great at grammar or spelling. A teacher in fourth year changed all that. “She saw through my spelling…
Lucy Sweeney Byrne
Writing is second nature to Lucy; her father was a film and music critic and her mother an English teacher who wrote. “I wrote my first book at six years old. My grandmother said they would…
Sheila Turner Johnston
Daughter of a Methodist minister from Cork, Sheila kept moving as a child, from Cork to Birr, in County Offaly, then to Donegal, before arriving in Belfast, where her mother was from. Sheila was a librarian…
Stephen Sexton
Stephen wrote his first poem, aged 8. “It was a strange rhyming poem about a mayfly. I didn’t write any more, after that, until the difficult teen years, when I wrote a few poems.” He was…
Sophie White
An only child brought up in Sandymount, Sophie always read. But she chose art, because writing was a family business. “I loved NCAD and got a first-class degree, but I loved drugs as well, and they…
Caroline Grace Cassidy and Lisa C Carey
When a friend of Lisa Carey’s called off his wedding at the last minute it got her thinking. His bride to be was in her late thirties and had given her fiancée the best years of…
Debut Roundup. September 2019. For Books Ireland
Saltwater by Jessica Andrews. Sceptre. When a debut novel is described as ground-breaking – and words like reinvention are used, my heart sinks. Because all too often this is just another way of saying that the…