Said the Dead is a book that was born in the archive. It grew from hundreds of hours spent studying a series of casebooks that had been rescued from the cellars of a derelict hospital nearby. By the time I happened to find these books in the archive, they were over a century old and incredibly fragile, their pages brittle and crumbling – but inside, another world was alive. I began with casebooks from the 1890s and slowly read my way towards the 1920s. Many of the books were printed with the name of the institution, ‘Cork District Lunatic Asylum’, a title I could never get used to, always flinching at the word ‘lunatic’, so abrasive to the …
Category: Read Irish Women
My best friend in school and college, Maria Gillis, reminded me recently that when we were in sixth year in Mount St Anne’s, during one religion class I asked our …
I think that anybody who has ever worked in a shop has been granted a perspective on the world that is unique. A secret code understood only by those of …
It’s that time of the year once again! It means only one thing for our bookseller, Karina, from our Rathmines shop: the annual #ReadIrishWomenChallenge23, and we at Dubray are delighted …
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 …
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 …
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