My fiction debut, The Amusements, is a novel of interconnected stories set in the seaside town of Tramore – a place I know well because my family are from Waterford. With the exception of William Trevor’s short story Honeymoon in Tramore, it’s a town that’s been overlooked by Irish writers. Yet to my mind, Tramore is bursting at the seams with stories, having had so many incarnations: originally a spa retreat for moneyed and rheumatic Victorians, it became a fashionable dancehall spot in …
Category: Read Irish Women
The strange thing about summer jobs is that we often take them at a time in our lives when we are waiting for ‘real life’ to begin. When I was …
Short stories are the subject of so much myth and mysticism that for a long time, I was afraid to try writing them. So when I was struck with a …
The Murder Rule grew from the smallest of seeds. I came across an article in a newspaper about a young Irish law student who had spent a summer volunteering in …
A few years ago, I was researching an article about mother-and-baby institutions in Ireland for my job at the BBC and had gotten stuck. The assignment felt like wading through …

We are over half way through the Read Irish Women Challenge 2022 and it has been wonderful to behold the enthusiasm and response on social media. Thank you to everyone …
For me, writing brings together my interests and hobbies into something unique and pleasurable. I love to paint – I enjoy historical research – and I like writing stories. I …
The idea of becoming a writer was given to me in a forest. There had been hints before but I’d ignored all the signs. Motherhood changed that. A group of …
‘The New Normal’ is a phrase we’ve all had to come to terms with over the last two years. Things that we thought would always be there, or always be …
Each of the novels I have written tell the story of an era of my life through the medium of fiction – details are exaggerated, places conflated, time compressed or …
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