Harp Maiden had a somewhat unexpected element to its creation. My initial plan was to write a tale about magical music, and I chose the flute. But after speaking in a primary school one morning, I joined the principal for a cup of tea afterwards and something she said set my head on fire. This lady was very excited to begin harp lessons and she explained this to me in some detail. By the time I arrived home, I was …
Category: Irish
Some books are easier to write than others. I’ve written one or two in a matter of weeks; others have taken several years. The House of Ashes was the latter. …
1. May we start with the title of the book? (Your notes to the text tell us that it’s a translation of a phrase from a poem by Schiller, later …
I wrote the first draft of All Her Fault at a corner of my dad’s dining room table – writing furiously to get the words down while my kids were …
I began writing Holding Her Breath when I was working at Dubray Books in Grafton Street. I loved the job – it was a joy to be around books all …
It all began with a reporter’s notebook and a murder, but by the time I’d finished, the story had expanded to encompass Irish land wars, adulterous love, a trans-Atlantic assassination …
This year marks my tenth anniversary as a full-time writer. And I’ve been reflecting on how much my writing life has changed over the years. One of these changes is …
How could it possibly be that a book which starts with a brutal murder in Arizona in 1915, before settling into an account of three more killings that took place …
My new novel The Beauty of Impossible Things is set in a small seaside town during a heatwave – a place of “novelties and souvenirs” to quote one of the …
I began the #ReadIrishWomenChallenge back in April 2019 as a way to spotlight great work by Irish female authors, and to start a conversation about their writing. Now that it’s …
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