Christine Dwyer Hickey

Life
[var. Dwyer-Hickey]; ed. National School; Hickey is dg. of independent building contractor; gd-dg. of professional dancer (gf.); her parents were alcoholic; ed. as a border at at Mount Sackville, Chapelizod; proceeded to Secretarial College after Intermediate Cert.; worked at Phoenix Park race course; completed Leaving Cert. at Sandymoutn High School; m. with three children; worked as private detective for legal agency with her husband; commenced writing when recovering from a broken collar-bone; won First Prize at Listowel Writers’s week with story of girl at races with her father;
 
won Listowel competition a second time, and afterwards the Observer Story Competition; recruited for Marino by Jo O’Donoghue; issued The Dancer (1994), and The Gambler (1996), and The Gatemaker (2000), a trilogy set in Dublin and London in 1918 onwards, and dealing with the family of a dancer, his sons George, Herbert and Charlie, and and his daughers Kate and Maude; employs stream of consciousness and covers the experience of a hare-lip child and hidden emotions involved in it; the author has also issued short stories; issued Tatty (2004), the story of a child brought up by two alcoholic parents; also Last Train from Liguria (2009), the story of an Bella Stuart Irish governess to a Jewish family in 1930s Fascist Italy, and later in Dubln.

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Works
The Dancer (Dublin: Marino Books 1995), 367pp.; The Gambler (Dublin: Marino Books 1996), 384pp.; The Gatemaker (Dublin: Marino Books 2000), 398pp.; Tatty (Dublin: Marino Books 2004), 205pp.; The Gambler (Dublin: New Island 2006), 348pp.; Last Train from Liguria (Atlantic 2009), 392pp.

Trilogy: The Dancer (Dublin: New Island 2005), 351pp.; The Gambler (Dublin: New Island 2006), and The Gatemaker (Dublin: New Island 2006).

Miscellaneous, ‘Christine Dwyer-Hickey reflects on some authors and books that have been important to her, particularly Janice Galloway’s Clara’, in “My Back Pages” [column of] The Irish Book Review (Summer 2006), p.50 [reports that the music - ‘the sound of the novel’ - about Clara Schumann changed the way she writes,]

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Criticism

  • Celia de Fréine, review notice of The Dancer, in Books Ireland (Oct. 1995), pp.244-45;
  • [q.a.,] Irish Times (4 Nov. 2000) review of The Dancer [speaking of the father’s ‘hazy, violent love’ for his sons and their respective fates.
  • Caitríona MacKernan, review of Last Train from Liguria, in Books Ireland (Sept. 2009), pp.176-77 [incls. detailed retelling].
 
See also ‘An interview with Christine Dwyer Hickey’, in BiblioFemme: An Irish Book Club (Nov. 2006) [copy or link].

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Commentary
Books Ireland (March 2004), interview: gives account on Tatty (2004), set in Dublin 1960s and 70s, a child’s-eye view of family disintegration under the strain of alcoholism, narrated by title character; author speaks of herself as ‘the adult child of alcoholic parents’ though she is ‘not saying the book is completely autobiographical, or that everything that happens to Tatty happened to [her]’. Speaks of herself as a ‘loner [...]’ and ‘a persistent dunce’ at national school, like the character. (p.41)

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