When I tell people, especially fellow writers, that I’ve completed The Watsons, one of Austen’s unfinished novels, the reaction has mostly been either laughter or an eyebrow arch that rises...

Sitting down to write this piece about my writing journey, has brought refection on how far I have come. Not only as a writer but as a person! The confidence...

Skin is a story about a woman, Natalie, who struggles with binge eating and anxiety and is spurred to travel to ‘find herself,’ literally and metaphorically. We see her journey...

Book 2 was actually Book 1. Night Swimming, out this month, was the first proper, finished, fully formed novel that I wrote. My Buried Life, which celebrates its fourth revolution...

My mentor was a Beat Poet and he had a peculiar affinity for the ‘strange familiar’. Along Exchequer Street, where I sit under two sound systems, my life—so far—is strange...

Saltwater is a fictional novel with roots in my own experiences. I have always liked thinking about the tiny details that make up a life; the Kiwi shoe polish my...

Only Pig-Headed Dogs Can Write Novels ‘Everybody has a book in them’ – so the saying goes. Rest assured, this is nonsense. Being able to write a piece of high-quality...

Many years ago, while idling away at postgraduate studies, I lived in an overpriced, rundown basement flat somewhere near Dublin’s Grand Canal. The fault was my own, for I insisted...

The Weight of a Text In September 2008 I left my job as a structural engineer to enrol in a fine art degree course. I had been working for a...

Of all the hours of advice on creating fiction I’ve sat through , the one sentence that really made me sit up was  ‘Write about what you know’.  But my...