Patricia’s Blog
Achill Island 1912: A Microcosm of Swirling Political Movements.
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Literary readings, three book launches, an illustrated lecture on ‘Women Artists on Achill’ by Catherine Marshall, and a guided walk on the nearby Clare Island, all feature in this year’s Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend on the May bank-holiday weekend. The book launches include Gisela Holfter’s Heinrich Böll and Ireland, which charts the Nobel Prize winning author’s connections…
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They say it is now ‘the largest off-road walking and cycling trail in Ireland’. The 42km Great Western Greenway stretching from Westport through Newport and Mulranny to Achill Island is proving to be a wonderful draw for walkers and cyclists alike. The trail follows the path of the disused line of the Midland Great Western…
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My piece in the current edition of Writing.ie here describes the path I travelled in writing my nonfiction book The Veiled Woman of Achill and the challenge of staying true to the facts of the story while building a compelling narrative around the 1894 dark events at the Valley House, Achill.
Read MoreOutrage on Achill. Delighted to get this review of The Veiled Woman of Achill by Aine Ryan in the Mayo News:
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Heinrich Boll in Ireland | Melville House Books. Melville House included Heinrich Boll’s Irish Journal in their book bundle for Saint Patrick’s Day. Boll’s book includes a wonderful sentence about Irish rain: ‘The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather.’ Irish Journal covers…
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You can walk in the footsteps of the artist Paul Henry, following the shoreline from Dooagh to Keel, as part of the May bank-holiday Achill Walks Festival. There are a half-dozen walks, some on the island, some on the north-west Mayo mainland in Ballycroy National Park and the Nephin mountain range. A century ago Paul…
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I have been absent from this blog while getting the book over the finish line. The Veiled Woman of Achill will be published by the Collins Press in April. There will be a launch in my home city of Limerick in late April and a launch / reading at the Valley House, Achill in early May.
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I caught a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip this week on O’Connell Bridge. Like many others I was a captive in Dublin’s south side, unable to cross the Liffey and pestering the Gardai about when the bridge would be reopening. Then Their Majesties just passed by in an armoured car, waving through the dark glass at the…
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‘A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’ This is how Graham Greene started his novel The End of the Affair – a book that was published sixty years ago, in 1951. The event was marked in…
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