About me


Thanks for checking out my website. I've been a professional writer all my working life. My commissions include fiction and non fiction books; original tv dramas and contributions to series; radio scripts; screenplays; chamber opera libretti; and work in digital media. 

Here's a list of my recent fiction: 





The Month Of Borrowed Dreams, the fourth in my series of Finfarran novels, is on 
pre-order now and comes out on June 7th 2018 .  
 

The Mistletoe Matchmaker book #3 in the series was published by Hachette Irl in October 2017 


Summer at the Garden Café book #2 in the series was published by Hachette Irl in May 2017. 

A second edition comes out April 2018.
The Library at the Edge of the World book #1 in the Finfarran series, was published in 2016. 


IN THE US AND CANADA  The Library at the Edge of the World  was published in November 2017, by Harper Perennial. 


 " A delicious feast of a novel. Sink in and feel enveloped by the beautiful world of Felicity Hayes-McCoy." ~ Cathy Kelly
" A charming and heartwarming story." ~ Jenny Colgan
"Engaging, sparkling, and joyous." ~ The Sunday Times
IN THE US AND CANADA Summer at the Garden Café will be published by Harper Perennial  in September 2018. 


You can pre-order it now from your choice of online sites.

Barnes & Noble: https://goo.gl/iTbEkH
Books-a-Million: https://goo.gl/UWvFCN
Google Play: https://goo.gl/NeEXKi

Translation rights in The Library at The Edge of The World have been sold to Germany, Italy, Holland, France, China and South Korea and are available from 2017. Summer at the Garden Café will be published in France in summer 2018.



**********

I was born in Dublin, Ireland, studied English and Irish language and literature at University College Dublin and emigrated to London in my early twenties where I built a successful career, first as an actress and then as a writer. In 1986 I met and married the English opera director Wilf Judd, then Artistic Director of The Garden Venture at Covent Garden's Royal Opera House. 

In 1995 Wilf and I set up JHM, an umbrella company under which creative work arising out of our shared artistic values is conceived and made. A JHM project involves work by one or both of us working partnership, often in collaboration with others. 

Wilf and I share a love of literature, theatre, ecology and design, and our life and work are now divided between a flat in inner-city London and a stone house at the western end of Ireland's Dingle Peninsula.





 Representation Gaia Banks at Sheil Land Associates UK

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

YOU'RE ALL INVITED TO A BOOK LAUNCH

Image
My Irish publishers Hachette are bringing out my fifth Finfarran novel on May 2nd and the  Gutter Bookshop in Dublin is hosting its launch, with drinks provided by my lovely West Kerry neighbours, The Dingle Whiskey Distillery. So here's an invitation to join the celebration. Do, please, come along if you're in Dublin on May10th. 
Writing the Finfarran novels is always a joy but this one is special because its plot came about by sheer happenstance.
Read more

St. Bridget's Day in Ireland

Image
Only a year before we moved in, the site of the Dublin house that I grew up in was a field. Down the road, after the house was built and the developers had moved on, there was a scrubby patch of trees. They've disappeared now, under concrete and more housing. But when I was a child a spring rose in the scrubland, flowing briefly between two oaks and disappearing again among their twisted roots.
I remember hours spent swinging out over the water on a rope tied to a branch, and letting go at the crucial moment to land in squelching mud on the other side.That survival of the countryside, hemmed in by two roads, was a favourite playground for us local kids. We called it St. Bridget's. And at the time I never asked myself why.
I don't know now if Bridget's name survives there. But I know that for thousands of years before I swung out across that water, people had come there to pray. It was the site of a holy well.
Wells dedicated to Bridget are found all over the country. Sh…
Read more

It's Perfectly Okay Not To Be Shakespeare

Image
Here's one of my occasional writing tips. I hope those of you who aren't writers will find it helpful too.
As more and more people are required to stay at home, for the sake of our own health and others', we're increasingly being exhorted to take this time to be creative. "Write a diary!", people say; or "here's your chance to start that novel"; or "why not take up a new hobby?; or "Shakespeare used downtime during the plague to write King Lear, you know!"
Well, yes, that was what Shakespeare did, but a/ he was a brilliant, professional playwright and b/ he and his contemporaries were accustomed to the frequent, localised, bouts of plague that disrupted their lives and work and closed London's theatres. Most of us are neither of those things so, personally, I'd forget about using Shakespeare as a role model.
Instead, I'd suggest this. In these unprecedented times, many of us may be helped by writing down th…
Read more