Life
1972- ; b. Park, Co. Derry, raised in Brussels; ed. TCD; and lives in Castletownsend, West Cork; freelance journalist in Ireland and UK; author of Shadow-box (1999), Winner of Irish Times Prize for Irish Fiction; from Bloomsbury on first six pages; based on story of Mina Loy and the pugilist poet Arthur Craven, spanning three continents and the first half of the 20th century, and inspired by lines from Paul Muldoon’s poem “Yarrow” her agent is A. P. Watt.
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Criticism
Roisin Ingle [interview-article], Irish Times (30 Oct. 1999); also Drawing Dead [extract from Work in Progress], in IASIL-Japan Journal of Irish Studies, XVII (2002), pp.7-13 [as infra].
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Drawing Dead [2002]: ‘He decided there was enough to all this. If he had things to say, he needed to say them, not scrawl pathetically on bar accessories as if they were things he would never get off his tightening chest. He was here. He had established a goal, he had pulled it off She needed to know this. She needed to know that in leaving him she was wrong, that it had pushed him into doing something for himself and that having done it, he had pushed himself beyond any point where she was necessary to him.
He had recently almost completely stopped hoarding parts of his day to tell her, jokes and observations they would have been complicit in, a strain of music she loved but which never hit the radio, a new book by a writer she liked, a kind of mushroom he had found in a little greengrocers in Donegal Town, one that had often appeared in the recipes they had tried together but was far too sophisticated for Longs Supermarket on the Waterside. Things. Things kept for later. Later not just not coming, but pissed away with an alacrity and certainty that overwhelmed him sometimes, mostly at night, in the dark, even lying next to someone else, but mostly kvlien he lay alone. Even at its most acute it echoed in him guilelessly but in his paranoia, in his conviction that a man lives as he lives and never regrets anything, he regretted his stoicism, his rmour’s effectiveness, the manner in which he had had so on completely shut down the side of him that yearned. / He needed something; not her, not them, not a replacement, not even a Great Love that could wipe this miserable matrix of despondency and betrayal out of his synapses and render him ready to go once again. He lacked want. [...]’ (In IASIL-Japan Journal of Irish Studies, XVII (2002, pp.7-13).
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