Telling people about The Great Unexpected is difficult for two reasons. Firstly, in many ways it’s a very personal story. I’ve borrowed from the lives and deaths of both of...

In these hazy days that follow the publication of my second novel, I find myself telling people how it came together relatively quickly and without much difficulty. “Grace After Henry?”...

I still have to remind myself that my life-long dream is actually coming true: my book is getting published. In the everyday running around of errands and motherhood, it’s hard...

Words are my currency. As editor of Woman’s Way magazine for the last nine years, I’m surrounded by sentences, headlines, puns (I love a pun) and the most important of...

Commenting on his book, An tOileánach, Tomás O’Crohan said at the turn of the last century: ‘I have done my best to set down the character of the people about...

When the call came, that I had been chosen to pen an official ITV Cold Feet novel, I was both excited and nervous. Could I stay true to the emotional...

Whatever your opinion of them, publishing trends, genres and sound-bitey tags are as much a part of the industry as the words in our books. Starting with Chick Lit in...

I’ve now written six novels and every one of them was a struggle to get into print. In the mid-1990s, I’d never had anything published – not a short story,...

One of the great things about being a writer is it is such a portable occupation. I spend many hours alone in my attic in Dublin writing my novels, but...

I wasn’t intending to write a novel. True, I had finally put fingers to keyboard again after many long years away, and I was throwing myself into a writing course...