Life
1947- ; b. 23 March, Montreal, Canada; father Irish diplomat; ed. convent school; ed. UCD (arch.), where she shared a drawing desk with Rory Quinn; worked in Derry as architect, 1969, living in a house formerly owned by Eddie McAteer and later by Martin McGuinness; m. John MacManus, settling in Galway where he took medical post; wrote as columnist with Sunday Tribune; Hennessy Short Story Award winner, 1981; issued novel Acts of Subversion (1991) telling the story of Oran Reidy, a working-class youth who joins the republican movement in 1970s;
served 9 years as Labour County Councillor in Wicklow; elected TD for Wicklow, 1992; won Listowel Writers’ Week Award, 1995; Deputy Leader of the Labour Party; retired from Dáil Eireann, 2011; describes herself as a ‘lapsed writer’; took MPhil in Creative Writing at TCD; issued The Shadow in the Yard (2015), in which a young mother is murdered and her body is left in a river, set in Letterkenny and Derry during the “Troubles”, in 1969.
| See Irish Labour Party “Liz McManus” Web Page - online |
Works
Acts of Subversion (Dublin: Poolbeg Press 1991), 236pp.; ‘‘The Land of Oz’’, in David Marcus, ed. Listowel Writers’ Week Award-winning Short Stories, 1973-94 (Dublin: Marino 1995); The Shadow in the Yard (Dublin: Poolbeg Press 2015).
Also, Radio interview with Theo Dorgan, on RTE/Lyric (4 April 2004); ‘Róisín Meets: Liz McManus in favour of removing 8th amendment’, in The Irish Times (14 Feb. 2015) [incls. soundcloud; available online]; ‘Fiction is about People and Not About Politics’, in The Irish Times (10 March 2015), Weekend [available online].
Criticism
Una Claffey, The Women Who Won: Women of the 27th Dáil (Dublin: Attic 1993), pp.23-31;
Notes
John Montague: Liz MacManus says one of the chars. in John Montague’s Death of a Chieftain is based on her father (who was he?).
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