About fifteen years ago, when I lived in London, there was an advertising campaign to encourage people to become teachers. The ads ran in cinemas and they featured head shots of men and women who looked straight into the camera and slowly said a name, before it panned to the next person. They were young
It is 91 days since my last blog post, the longest gap so far. Since I last posted I have rented out my house, wound up my business, sold my car, packed up, sold, stored, gave away and shipped my stuff and been through the complexities and uncertainty of US immigration. I’ve bid goodbye to
The title of this blog post came to me earlier this evening, as I stood on my yoga mat in Bryant Park and raised my arms and my gaze to a rectangle of cloud overhead. I know I should have been staying present, but it was hard to do when the clap of thunder from
It is hot in New York. Since yesterday, it has been hot. Last night, in Times Square, my ice cream ran before I could eat it, lines of vanilla and chocolate sprinkles sticky on the paper. Neon lights were off, electrical fuses blown from over worked air conditioners. The sun was long down, but the
Very late post just to say if anyone’s at the Dalkey Book Festival tomorrow I’m reading in New to You at 2pm. Topic is how growing up in Dalkey influenced my writing so sitting here selecting which of the many scenes set by the sea that I might read from The Other Boy and What
This week marks the 40th anniversary of Ireland’s longest running literary festival; Listowel Writers’ Week. You can only have your first Listowel experience once and mine was seven years ago. I’d never been to the town before and pulling into the square in a taxi with three strangers, what I remember seeing first is the
This piece originally appeared in the Irish Daily Mail magazine last September. I thought it might be worth sharing here for anyone who hasn’t already seen it…. Growing up next to the sea, you take it for granted. That’s not to say you don’t notice its beauty, just that it is always there, like, say,
Today is the second of April. And too late I realise that it’s five whole weeks since I’ve been writing ‘update blog’ on my to do list, five whole weeks since I’ve been moving it onto the next day. It’s not that March was a barren blogging month. Far from it, there were lots of
The Dublin Book Festival is bigger than ever this year, running from Thursday 2nd March until Sunday 6th. There are three things I really like about this year’s programme. The first is that there is, quite literally, something for everyone. Whether your thing is prose or poetry, crime or literary fiction, history or comedy, the
