About

I was born in a harbour town in Mayo, the third of four, in a house where the tide was a fact you planned the day around. My father worked a boat until the boat stopped being worth working. That is the whole of my subject and I have stopped pretending otherwise.

I came to Galway at eighteen to study history and stayed for the archive. For nine years I catalogued parish and harbour records for the county, which is where I learned that the interesting thing is never the event, it is the ledger entry three weeks later when somebody has to account for it.

The first novel took five years and eleven rejections. Ferryman Press took it in 2015 and has published every book since. Four novels, two collections of stories, two books of essays and two anthologies I edited. Fourteen languages, which still seems like a clerical error.

I write longhand, at a window on the second floor of a house above the Claddagh, in numbered hardback notebooks. Thirty-one so far. I swim at Blackrock at seven every morning of the year, which people find more interesting than the books, and I have made my peace with that too.