July | This is not the post I'd planned on writing, but I have some very exciting news!

And I want to share it with you.

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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

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I can remember my very first experience of reading as a child, when letters on a page suddenly swam together into words and made sense. I was six years old, and it was a comic based on the Disney movie, Robin Hood; the images had no speech bubbles, but a short paragraph beneath each one. After that, there was no stopping me; three years later I was reading Richard Adams’s Watership Down, Joy Adamson’s Born Free, Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Tristan and Iseult, Mary Stewart’s Authurian Saga, and anything else I could get my hands on.

As soon as I could read, I also began writing my own stories. As a young teen, I wrote a high fantasy novel on scraps of paper, which I still have, and some pretty woeful poetry, which I also still have. But growing up in poverty in a single-parent family in a small northern industrial town, I never took my writing seriously. I left school, got a job in an office and then a factory, and put aside my writing. Working class people like me did not become novelists. I never finished the fantasy.

Dreams don’t fade, though. If anything, they become more urgent. In 2019, I finally surrendered. I decided to write a creative non-fiction piece for my Bachelor of Arts English literature dissertation. My supervisor suggested I turn it into a book. So I did. I got an agent. And now I have a publisher!

My book, Imperfect Bodies, is going to be published in the spring of 2026, and I can’t wait for you all to read it!

You can read more about my writing journey here.

You can check out my publisher, Héloïse Press, here.

This is what founder Aina Marti says of Héloïse Press:

“Héloïse Press champions world-wide female talent. Héloïse’s careful selection of books gives voice to emerging and well-established female writers from home and abroad. With a focus on intimate, visceral and powerful narratives, Héloïse Press brings together women’s stories and literary sophistication.”

As such, I think it is the perfect home for my book.

I was awarded a Literature Bursary Award for Imperfect Bodies from The Arts Council of Ireland, and this is what they said about it:

“[Imperfect Bodies is] based around motherhood, disability and women's experience. Sample writing at once raw and stylishly eloquent, propulsive and compelling, rich in detail, powerful and extremely moving.”

“Gifted prose author engaging with family and life challenges of daughter's disability and recasting them in prose … of uncommon grace, emotional intelligence and turbulent, finely wrought beauty.”

Does that sound like something you’d like to read? I am so excited that my book will soon become something real and solid, making its own journey into the world beyond me, and into the hands and hearts and minds of readers. It’s a little scary, too!

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Thank you to my agent, Charlotte Seymour of Johnson & Alcock Literary Agency, and to my publisher, Aina Marti of Héloïse Press. And thanks to you, my subscribers, for supporting my writing.