United Kingdom
Writer of fiction and features, based in Northern Ireland.
Mentee on Irish Writers Centre programme 2020
Working on debut novel
The emptiness was the strangest thing. Turning each corner on the muddy path, there was only absence. Absence of the man with the two stubborn dogs who won't let him put on their leads as he swears vile threats into their floppy ears.
The road was dotted with potholes and slick with rainwater and silage from the tractors. The wiry hedgerows came fast towards Patricia at each bend in the road and she had to yank on the steering wheel each time she approached a turn.
Fiction
Three stories & a mini-story from Adelaide: Andy Warmington goes back in time with Pringles; Bob Salisbury goes back to the Cold War; Rose goes back to see her dad; Helen McClements goes to the eco-resort. Paul is your host.
Chains: Unheard Voices is an anthology of eleven short stories. It is the first offering from a new independent publisher whose stated aim is: "to empower writers who have been pushed to the margins by the mainstream" The tales included here are challenging, poignant, and at times disturbing.
Short story anthologies are [for me at least] a treat. Something to dip in and out of, to revel in, but only for twenty pages or so, before returning to the everyday. You could say, a book for the modern world.
Gavin Fulcroft's life could be measured, with precision, along a line of hammered wooden posts and fencing wire. This was true of his lineage going back some five or more generations. While Gavin tore merry hell through childhood and shuffled past a disregarded education, his father had erected forty-seven miles of pig-wire fencing along the Southern edge of a muck-stained farming county.
Features
It is July 1967. Jacqueline Kennedy has just holidayed in Ireland with her family and attended the Irish Sweeps Derby with Taoiseach Jack Lynch. Later that month in Dublin, a plane arrives from America and the man with the trumpet and the funny voice, for many, steps out.
The Measure of Whisky and Literature Andy Warmington Whisky has made fleeting appearances in both literature and the lives of its authors for over 200 years. The thoughts and reputations of writers with a suitably high profile and preference for darker spirits appear on record, and their relationship to alcohol was as individual as their writing.
Richard Brautigan wrote twelve novels, ten published in his lifetime, one posthumously and one never published. His fourth novel is formally titled, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, usually shortened to The Abortion, and was first published in 1971.