All about First Drafts!!!

Put on the kettle and call over and visit Rebecca Bradley's Blog..Murder Down to a Tea, where I'm talking all about first drafts!! 

YOU CAN VISIT HERE

Culture Night at the Irish Writers' Centre!!!

Really looking forward to reading at this event..It will be a great evening and one not to be missed!

Crime Fiction Events at Mountains to the Sea Festival!!!

Jane Casey & Liz Nugent

Chaired by Sue Leonard

Sunday 14^th September, 2.30

Venue: dlr Lexlcon

Twice shortlisted for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year Award, Jane Casey has written a series of international bestsellers, while D.C. Maeve Kerrigan has become one of the most popular characters in crime fiction. The fifth in the series, The Kill, has a killer terrorising London but this time it is the police who are the targets. Jane Casey was born and brought up in Dublin. She studied English at Oxford and Trinity College, Dublin. Married to a criminal barrister, she lives in London.

Local writer Liz Nugent is an award-winning writer of radio and television drama. Her first novel, Unravelling Oliver, is an arresting psychological thriller and a complex, elegant study of the making of a sociopath. Published in spring 2014, it became an instant bestseller and was described by Ryan Tubridy as ‘Gone Girl meets The Spinning Heart - I couldn’t put it down.’ With this stunning debut, Liz Nugent joins the ranks of the Emerald Noir school of successful Irish crime writers.

Sue Leonard writes interview-based features for the Irish Independent, the Irish Examiner and other publications. She recently co-wrote the number one bestseller, An Act of Love with Marie Fleming.

 

Lee Child in conversation with Declan Hughes

Sunday 14^th September, 4.30

Venue: Pavilion TheatreS

Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. His novels consistently achieve the number one slot in hardback and paperback on bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, and are translated into over forty languages.

All have been optioned for major motion pictures, the first of which, Jack Reacher, was based on the novel One Shot. He was awarded the Crime Writers Association Diamond Dagger in 2013.

Jack Reacher, the popular drop-out renegade crusader for justice, returns in a brand-new thriller, Personal, in Lee Child’s number one bestselling series. Jack Reacher walks alone. Once a go-to hard man in the US military police, now he’s a drifter of no fixed abode. But the army tracks him down because someone has taken a long-range shot at the French president. Only one man could have done it. And Reacher is the one man who can find him.

Local author Declan Hughes is well known to festival audiences. Hailed as "the best Irish crime novelist of his generation’" his latest novel is All The Things You Are.

Karen Perry & Sinéad Crowley

Chaired by Vanessa O'Loughlin

Sunday 14^th September, 6.30

Venue: dlr Lexlcon

Karen Perry is a new writing partnership composed of Karen Gillece, author of four critically-acclaimed novels, and Paul Perry, poet, creative writing lecturer and former curator of Poetry Now. Their exciting thriller debut The Boy That Never Was was described by Jeffery Deaver as “a pitchperfect balance of driving plot and honest complex human emotion….the story grips your heart in the early pages and never lets go.”

Sinéad Crowley is currently Arts and Media Correspondent with RTÉ. A few years ago she set herself the challenge of finishing a novel before she turned 40. That book, Can Anybody Help Me is a psychological thriller which draws on her experiences as a mother and internet-user and tells the story of a young woman who becomes dependent on a parenting website after her first child is born. Online, can you always know who your friends are?

Vanessa O'Loughlin runs leading publishing consultancy, The Inkwell Group.  She is also the founder of the writing resources website Writing.ie.

What is it about the crime genre that attracts so many first-time novelists? Hear three successful professionals discuss why it so attracted them and how they turned to a life of crime-writing.

World Class Top Notch Thriller says BBC Radio Ulster!

BBC Radio Ulster Review of LAST KISS..."Best one yet...loved this..immediately sucks you in, once you start reading you've got to keep going. Phillips deserves to be known well beyond these shores...this is not just an Irish Crime Thriller, it's among the best crime writing in the World..."

Listen to full review HERE (it's about 42 minutes in)

Blackberry Picking - Seamus Heaney

When I went out walking earlier on, the blackberries were in abundance along the mountain hedgerows, despite it being early October.  I thought again, as I did last year about Seamus Heaney's poem, Blackberry Picking, and it seems like the perfect way to celebrate. I hope you enjoy it too.


LISTEN

Blackberry Picking

Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
we trekked and picked until the cans were full,
until the tinkling bottom had been covered
with green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Lady killers and the Queens of the Irish Crime Scene

Article in the Sunday Independent today - Lady killers and the Queens of the Irish Crime Scene.....

What it says about LAST KISS...."Phillips is superb at suspense, at conjuring up a dark menacing atmosphere, but her underlying humanity stops it from becoming too bleak..." Yes, I'll take that!!

"These criminal minds are so good at story-telling that not reading them should be against the law"

Deadline approaching!!

One month to go to the deadline of the JACK HARTE Bursary  - Read all about it HERE

By the Book Review of LAST KISS!!

By the Book Reviews regarding Last Kiss..."I can certainly validate that Phillips is an equal to James Patterson, Sara Paretsky, Patricia Cornwell or any of the other authors of cracking good police procedurals..." READ FULL REVIEW HERE 

Talking with Edel Coffey of the Irish Independent!

The thing about weddings!!!