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...

A few years ago, I started working on a novel. A type of novel that didn’t yet seem to exist. Not zombies in space; not aliens on Tinder; not a...

Since the #MeToo movement uncoiled and private matters have become public – Belfast, Blasey – women have been on trial for their memories. Female experience has always been branded ‘alleged’,...

An editor once warned me off labelling my writing as historical fiction. ‘It’s a narrow genre,’ he said, ‘and it gives off a certain impression.’ He was talking about a...