Speculative Fiction

Where the Dead Go, Eamon Harrigan

Having a busy and varied career in business and management spanning twenty years, Eamon Harrigan has consistently written little pieces here and there – often observances on his career in business and the people and places he encountered. He couldn’t seem to shake off the writing bug, and now his debut novel, Where the Dead Go, soundly announces Harrigan as a strong voice in an under-the-radar genre, Irish noir-fantasy fiction.

Four years ago came the watershed moment; Harrigan applied and was successful in getting a place on the M.A. in Screenwriting at the Huston Film School at N.U.I. Galway. He gave up the day-job and took writing and study on full-time. “It (the course) opened my eyes to a lot of things; I had a lot to learn about the craft of screenwriting. We were shown what writing for screen meant and what could be produced. I do believe screen writing is a craft more than an art. There are certain rules you have to follow, as opposed to fiction and writing a novel.”

“Then I won a scholarship from that course (M.A. in Screenwriting) to go and study in University of California at Los Angeles to do a three-month professional screenwriting programme, and I really enjoyed that. The tutor worked with Pixar and was fresh from working on their film Up, so it was an amazing experience. It was a very practical and commercially orientated course. You quickly learn you have to write the very best screen play you can in order to get it produced. If you write even a bad first page, it will end up in the bin. We learned an awful lot about pitching your writing and your screen play to various companies and how best to present your work.”

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