My aul fella used to say, Darran, you’re too sensitive. Too deep. What do you want? 

Until my thirties, I believed my sensitivity was a flaw that held me back—until I went travelling. In 2015, I cycled across Europe and lived for 4 months on a Thai island—where I wrote a travel journal. When I returned, I published it as Fields of Nettles. 

Some might have caught the travel bug, but I caught the writing bug. 

After years of releasing music, I realised that I’d overlooked the essence of my creativity—the lyrics. I remembered  picking up a guitar at 15 and writing ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’, a deep and reflective song that went over the heads of everyone—except my mother, who, being from Belfast and living in Dublin, was treated like a stranger. 

A Catalyst

In 2019, after working for years without enthusiasm at a job I hated, I was thankfully fired by my ego-maniac employer and fell into a depression. This turned out to be serendipitous as I threw myself into writing fulltime and wrote my debut novel TREOIR: CURSE ON THE ISLAND, in 2020.

 Final Cover of my novel:

You can grab a copy of the novel here

Three New Novels.

In 2016 I set a goal to write for 10,000 hours before I called myself a writer. I haven’t stopped writing. I haven’t kept track. But somthing clicked in 2024 after I took a writing course. The course itself didn’t teach me anything new, but it erased a few miconceptions I had about my writing, good and bad.

My newest book, ‘Last Train from Biarritz’ is about the ephemeral love that forms between a suicidal young woman and a dying man when they meet hopping freight trains in southern France. Since finishing that novel at the end of 2021, I’ve been shopping it around to agents and redrafting it. 

In 2025, I wrote 2 books: Forest of Lies and The Balleyer. I began Forest of Lies on the 25th of January and finished a 77k word draft on the 19 of February, 2025. I based it on the Beach by Alex Garland, a book I loved in my 20’s and wanted to create a fun, dark story that had something moralistic at its core while keeping with my style of travel. In February, I got down to writing the Ballyer, about a cad in small town Ireland in the 1960s. I’m currently finishing up The Balleyer and editing Forest of Lies. 

I believe these 3 books are home runs… we’ll see. 

You can read Chapter 1 of Forest of Lies here:

INFLUENCES

Writers who’ve influenced me: 

Barbra Kingsolver, Kevin Barry, Sally Rooney, Margret Attwood, Yann Martel, Salman Rushdie, John Steinbeck, Alexander Dumas, Alex Garland, George Orwell, Annie Proulx, Emily Bronte, Robert M. Pirsig and among many others.

Books that impacted me:

Demon Copperhead by Barbra Kingsolver.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

Call of the Wild by Jack London.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Pearl by John Steinbeck.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

And many more…