Meet Our Bloggers!

Writing.ie are delighted that some of Ireland's hottest new writing talent has joined us to bring you their thoughts and collective experience to help inspire your writing day. Subscribe by RSS feed to be kept up to date with new posts, or drop in regularly to find out what our guest bloggers have been up to.

From Cork, CATHERINE RYAN HOWARD brings you Double Spaced. Catherine self-published her first book, a travel memoir called Mousetrapped: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida, in March 2010. Making the best use of blogging, Twitter and Facebook, eleven months later Catherine has sold 3,000 copies of it. Her first novel has a big 'For Sale' sign on it while the second is making the arduous journey from her brain to her Mac. In her previous life she worked as an administrator in the Netherlands, a campsite courier in France and a front desk agent in Walt Disney World. She wants to be a NASA astronaut when she grows up. (She’s 28.) Visit her blog at www.catherineryanhoward.com or follow her on Twitter @cathryanhoward.

ALISON WELLS lives in Bray, Co. Wicklow with her husband and four young children. Her short fiction been published in magazines and online and print anthologies and she has been featured on Sunday Miscellany. Shortlisted for the 2009 Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and this year’s Bridport, Fish Prize and inaugural WOW awards, she is completing a themed short story collection Random Acts of Optimism and a literary novel. To read Alison's full blog, visit Head Above Water. Find out here, in her Random Acts of Optimism how she manages to juggle writing, children and life.

KATE DEMPSEY is a writer and a blogger living in Maynooth. She writes fiction and non-fiction as well as poetry and is widely published in Ireland and abroad, in magazines, anthologies and on the radio. She fits this around her family and a full time job, writing on the sofa, on the train and in that little coffeeshop on the corner. Poetry can be a solitary activity and  she appreciates the support she received from the online community, particularly when starting out. She is excited about continuing the dialogue with her blog here and at emergingwriter.blogspot.com.

ELIZABETH ROSE MURRAY 

Elizabeth Rose Murray lives in West Cork where she writes full time, fishes and grows her own vegetables. Represented by Sallyanne Sweeney at Watson Little, she writes mainly for children and Young Adults. As a content writing and social media specialist, Elizabeth has been heavily involved in the Irish literary scene; she was the official blogger for the Dublin Writers Festival, (2009 & 2010), the Cork Spring Literary Festival (2011) Listowel Writers’ Week (2011), the Dublin Book Festival (2011) the Frank O’Connor Short Story Festival (2011) and more. She also travels the country, helping writers and artists unravel the mysteries of social media so they can establish online profiles. Her poetry and fiction has been published in various online and print magazines, and she was shortlisted for the 2009 Aesthetica poetry prize. Follow her on Twitter @ERMurray or visit her website www.ermurray.wordpress.com  to find out about her rural life.

MARY BURNHAM: If I were a book, I’d choose to be A Woman in Berlin.  Not that I’ve ever lived in a war torn city with an advancing army of hot blooded Cossacks about to ravage everything in sight!  But I am a survivor, someone who knows how to compromise, get the job done, and go against the grain even if it costs me everything.  Luckily, I work in Dubray Books, Dun Laoghaire, where my colleagues make the daily grind a pleasure and where I do what I do best, surrounded by my beloved books. Sometimes they even let me out to help book clubs of all sorts and sizes get started, and for the occasional literary dinner...

Mary welcomes guest posts on her Bookseller Blog, so if you are a book seller, get in touch with us This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it !

LOUISE PHILLIPS Born in Dublin, Louise Phillips began writing in 2006, when her youngest son turned thirteen. Since then, Louise has won the Jonathan Swift Award with her story Last Kiss. She was a winner in the Irish Writers’ Centre Lonely Voice Platform, short-listed for the Molly Keane Memorial Award, Bridport UK, and long-listed twice for RTE Guide/Penguin short story competition. Louise has been published as part of many anthologies, including County Lines from New Island, and various literary journals.

CAREN KENNEDY lives in Dublin where she writes personal essays and all sorts in between working as an editor and researcher. She is the creator of a television series currently in pre-production and co-author of Fake Alibis (BenBella Books 2009).

In conjunction with Inkwell Writers Workshops, Caren facilitates an online television writing course.  For more information on this course visit: http://www.inkwellwriters.ie/Writing-TV-Treatments.html or go direct to Caren’s website: www.carenkennedywrites.com.

To find what out she really gets up to and what her take is on the writing game, read her one and only blog ‘Word Play’ here on writing.ie and if you like what you see, you can follow her on Twitter @CarenKennedy. She loves to chat and always follows back.

Derek Flynn is an Irish writer and musician. He has an Honours Degree in English Literature and Philosophy. He’s been published in a number of publications, including The Irish Times, and was First Runner-Up in the 2011 J. G. Farrell Award for Best Novel-In-Progress. His writing/music blog – ‘Rant, with Occasional Music’ – can be found here: http://derekflynn.wordpress.com and on Twitter, he can be found here: http://twitter.com/#!/derekf03 

Barry Houlihan is a professional archivist and specialises in theatre and literary archives. He has catalogued the Project Arts Centre archive (1967-2003) at the National Library of Ireland, established an archive for the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin and produced a research guide on the history of Smock Alley Theatre. Barry has worked as a researcher for ‘Cultureshock’ program on Newstalk FM radio and also recently acted as researcher for the RTE Radio 1 documentary series ‘From Stage to Street’. Barry is currently working for NUI Galway Library where he is cataloguing the archives of Druid Theatre Company and the Galway Arts Festival. You can follow Barry on Twitter @stagedreaction.

After attending an Inkwell writing workshop in March 2009, Hazel Gaynor ventured out to explore a new career as a freelance journalist and has written regularly, for the national press, magazines and websites in the UK and Ireland, ever since. In the process of developing her freelance career, she set up her blog ‘Hot Cross Mum’ which she went on to self-publish as an eBook ‘Hot Cross Mum: Bitesize Slices of Motherhood’. Her blogging success has been featured in The Sunday Times Magazine and Irish Times and Hazel has also appeared on TV3’s ‘The Morning Show’ and Newstalk radio.

Most recently, Hazel set up a book review blog for hellomagazine.com, reviewing books by, and interviewing authors such as Jojo Moyes, Zoe Miller, Katie Fforde, Melissa Hill, Monica McInerney, Maria Duffy and others. With two completed novels waiting patiently ‘in the bottom drawer’, Hazel is excited to be working on a new fiction novel.  Originally from North Yorkshire, England, Hazel now lives with her husband, two young children and an accident-prone cat in County Kildare. Her family are all very supportive of her quest to become a published author and honestly don’t mind when she forgets to feed them. Hazel is represented by Sheila Crowley of Curtis Brown.