Life
Dg. parents who worked as teachers in Nigeria, wehre she was born; raised in Nigeria, Kenya and Malawi; ed. Loreto Convent, Kenya; returned to Athlone; moved with family to Australia; ed. Univ. of Sydney; commenced writing; travelled to Russia and Israel; taught at London East End school; settled in Galway; worked as free-lance journalist; shortlisted for Evening Herald Today FM Paperback Writer prize; a novel Belios (2005) published by Anthony Farrell at Sitric (Lilliput).
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Works
Fiction, Belios (Lilliput 2005), 200pp.
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Commentary
Books Ireland (April 2005), pp.76-77 [interview article], incls. account of Belios (2005): ‘Irish fiction has produced some darkly haunting characters but few as twisted and sinister as Foyle’s protagonist Noah Gilmore. A celebrity biographer, more used to glorifying the minor talents of pop stars, he turns up at the Oughterard home of a once celebrated photographer, William Belios, begging to hear his life story. / An alcoholic, chain-smoking, woman-beating wreck, Gilmore seems an unlikely confidante for the terminally ill Belios and his three grown-up children. But in this deeply dysfunctional family he may have met his match. / There’s Belios himself, a former missionary priest who converted to photography when he met his wife Lily, a journalist, in Africa. When their children were still young, Lily was murdered in mysterious circumstances and the family returned to Ireland, where Daddy Belios appears to have rested on his reputation as a gifted photographer while pursuing an incestuous relationship with one of his daughters. Of the three children-Aoife, the devoted nursemaid; jarlath, the drug-addicted dilettante; and Mebh, an erotic illustrator-it is the latterwho impresses Gilmore the most, despite, or perhaps because of, her open hostility. In between desperate calls to his psychiatrist, flashbacks to his own troubled childhood, rough sex with his submissive girlfriend and daily drinking binges, Gilmore manages to uncover the family’s sad and sordid secrets. Foyle’s achievement, through lyrical, well-paced prose and the unstinting honesty of her delivery, is to keep us reading to the bitter end.’ (p.76.)
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