I was born into a family with a strong military tradition on both sides. As a child I assumed that everyone had parents who had ‘been in the war.’ Growing...

When I’m asked about my fiction, I tend to start rabbiting on about the things I am trying to explore, the political implications and so on. But if I stop...

My debut novel, Innocents was released on September 27, 2017. I started writing the first draft on February 14, 2014.   I got caught in a lie, is what happened....

It might sound odd to say it, but there is no such thing as historical fiction. And yet if you write a literary novel set in the past, let’s say...

Any writer will recognize this start: as a child, reading and writing were simply the things I always did.  At seven, I filled an exercise book with short stories and...

  Back in 1992, I wasn’t prepared for the bewildering rush on sales of my first novel, The Light Makers, when Gay Byrne, interviewing me on his radio show, pronounced...

To entitle a novel is to sum it up into a tidy shorthand with the objective of attracting attention and arousing the curiosity of potential readers. The task is to...

At it Again! love bringing Irish literature to life. For our most recent literary adventure, we have been distilling the essence of Jonathan Swift’s mad trip Gulliver’s Travels. Find out...

“If the world says ‘No’, pretend you’ve gone deaf – that’s the only advice I could give to an aspiring writer,” says Orla McAlinden, author of The Accidental Wife. “And,...

I always get too involved with my characters and end up with this strange kind of love for them, unrequited (obviously, seeing as they don’t exist!) and nameless (I think),...