My dad used to say, Darran, you’re too deep. What do you want out of life?  

Writing found me late.

Until my thirties, I believed that pensiveness held me back, ‘too much’ depth, a flaw that I tried my best to get rid of—until I started releasing music and got a following. In 2016, I went travelling—cycled across the UK, western Europe, over the Alps, and then I lived for 4 months on a Thai island. There, I wrote a travel journal, which I published soon after as Fields of Nettles.

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

I needed to get deep into it; fix one corner of things. One piece of a chaotic, unfixable world. Organise one mind. Save one life. Make one person who can’t smile, dream. Even if that one person was me. I think all writers are like that. Lone warriors. Find the right words and you find the key to your existence.

A Catalyst.

At the start of 2019, after working for years without enthusiasm at a job I hated, I was thankfully fired by my 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, and published it at the end of 2020.

Three New Novels.

In 2016, I set a goal to write for 10,000 hours before I dared call myself a writer. I haven’t stopped writing. I haven’t kept track. But somthing clicked in 2023 after I finished a writing course. The course itself didn’t teach me a whole lot new, but it erased a few miconceptions I had about my writing—good and bad.

I’ve been redrafting a novel since 2021 called Last Train to Anywhere and shopping it around to agents and redrafting. During 2023-25, I wrote a few books. However, two that I’m working on, Forest of Lies and The Balleyer, have potential. Forest of Lies was a surreal experience. I began it on the 25th of January 2025 and wrote 4000-ish words every day, based around a plot I developed on the fly. 3.5 weeks later, I had a finished 80k-word draft. I based it very loosely on the Beach by Alex Garland, a book I loved in my twenties and wanted to create a fun, dark story that had something moralistic at its core and relevant to modern society, while keeping with my style of travel. It’s about two broke digital nomads who exploit the story of a couple’s joint suicide for clicks, set in Japan. 

In March, I got straight back to writing the Ballyer while I waited for a few months before editing Forest of Lies. The Balleyer is about a cad in small town Ireland in the 1960s caught between two rival families. 

I am currently seeking agent representation for Last Train to Anywhere. 

For info and enquiries, email me here