Biography

With the exception of winning a national essay competition at the age of 11 – it was about a cow, but that’s another story! - and helping to write a Slut’s Manual for a friend turning 21, I didn’t start writing until 1996. This was after I had become disillusioned with my office job and taken to eating lunch alone at my desk everyday, reading anything I could get my hands on – good and bad.

After finishing one particularly awful book I thought, as we all do, ‘I can do better than this’ and I started writing. I wrote a few chapters, put it away and forgot all about it. Several months later when I had left my job, I was going through some old files and found it again. I told a girlfriend and she bullied me into sending it to a publisher.  I sent it to Kate Cruise O’Brien in Poolbeg, she rang me the next day and we signed a contract a month later.

The first novel, Too Little, Too Late was published in Ireland at the beginning of March 1999. It went straight in to the Bestseller’s chart at number four, climbed to number two and made the long hard slog worthwhile when it reached number one where it stayed for two weeks.
Six more books followed - Shaken & Stirred, A Cut Above, Forever FM, Red Letter Day, Changing Places and most recently The Betrayal of Grace Mulcahy.- and are available throughout Ireland, the UK and commonwealth countries and translated into Dutch, German, Polish and Russian.

When I’m not writing I’m either doing the usual things a busy mother does or spending time with my husband and kids. If I get the chance, I like to read or just sit back and watch the world go by. We’ve just moved into our new home in the country and there are cows in the next field. Perhaps I’ve come full circle!