When I was a teenage writer, I wrote to the Listowel short story writer Bryan MacMahon looking for literary advice on a story I’d written. I was delighted some weeks later – this was the 70s in the days of handwritten letters – to get a reply, but terribly disappointed with what he said. At […]
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a shamefully under-rated writer. A true polymath, she writes in English and Irish, and across the genres – young adult, crime, and literary fiction in both the short story and the novel forms. Her second Selected Stories volume, just published by Dalkey Archive Press, demonstrates the range and breadth of her […]
I’m delighted to announce that two of the writers I most admire will read together in the first of University College Cork’s School of English reading series. Between them, they have charted the female – and Irish – experience in five different genres over 40 years. Ireland Professor of Poetry, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and the […]
Prosperity Drive, my latest collection of stories, gets a Dublin launch this week at one of my “local” bookshops, The Rathgar Bookshop. I grew up in Rathgar and eagle-eyed readers might recognize echoes of the locality in the collection. The Rathgar Bookshop is that rare thing – a sturdy, independent, suburban bookshop serving a loyal […]
The cover of Surge is fiery looking, as befits an anthology of new writing. The volume from Brandon Press is a celebration of the old and the new; its publication marks the 40th anniversary year of O’Brien Press and is named after a Dublin literary magazine of the 1930s/40s established by Thomas O’Brien, among others. (Thomas […]
