My writing became a serious endeavour in 2015 after I returned from 6 months travelling. I used that life-affirming experience to write a travel journal called Fields of Nettles in 2016 and as the inspiration for my debut novel TREOIR: CURSE ON THE ISLAND in 2020.

During my 2015 trip, while living on Koh Chang Thailand for 4 months, I began writing. I had no idea how to structure sentences properly, I vaguely understood what an independent clause was and my spelling was horrendous. Undeterred, I began scribbling a first draft of a book then called, ‘The Governor’s Daughter’, about an Irish man trying to reconnect with his estranged, American, ex-con son after he stumbles upon the rebellious daughter of a corrupt governor.

When I returned to Dublin at the start of 2016, I began editing ‘The Governor’s Daughter’. I taught myself the intimacies of voice and what it means to write well (by writing bad for a long time, reading a lot and experimenting, which might show up in my motley short stories).

A CATALYST

In 2019, after working without much enthusiasm at a job I had lost my passion for, I was fired by my ego-maniac employer and fell into a depression. This turned out to be serendipitous. From the ashes of despair, a novel arrived: ‘Treoir’. 

Around that time, I was having lucid dreams. I’m not usually one of those people who tries to interpret dreams, but this one resonated with me for some reason. That dream eventually became the island setting for ‘Treoir‘ (Irish for  Guardian). I wrote it in about 6 weeks, between May-June 2019, and self-published it on October 9th,  2020.

Cover ideas:

Click To Buy The Novel

Post Self-Publication and 3 New Novels.

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.

This is the book I think I was trrrying to write when I began writing. Since finishing it in 2021, I’ve been shopping it around to agents, and redrafting it. At the end of 2024, I began 2 books, The Balleyer, and Forest of Lies. I began the latter on the 25th of January and finished a 77k first draft on the 19 of February, 2025. 3.5 weeks. I based it on the book the Beach, 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 and (at the time of writing this) am planning to edit Forest of Lies in March. I believe these 3 books to be home runs… we’ll see. 

INFLUENCES

I’m inspired by writers like John Steinbeck, Emily Brontë, Alexander Dumas, Alex Garland, George Orwell, Annie Proulx, Robert M. Pirsig and Salman Rushdie among many others.

Books that impacted me:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Pearl by John Steinbeck.

Call of the Wild by Jack London.

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

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

The Beach by Alex Garland.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

Life of Pie by Yann Martel.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

And many more…