Sue Leonard

PATRICK DEWITT is a born writer. He has never wanted to do anything else. However, leaving school early, eschewing college, and never attending a creative writing programme, it took him a long while to figure out […]

Kate Beaufoy dreamed of restoring a house she fell in love with. Instead, she restored its historical characters to bring them back to life, as she explains to Sue Leonard   KATE BEAUFOY looks beautiful in […]

Graham Masterton has set a thriller in Cork and makes a senior garda, Katie Maguire, its central character. He spoke to Sue Leonard about his life with words and stories. WE MET days after the tragic […]

 IT’S Christmas 2010, and the snow is falling fast. The weather prevents Dublin barrister, Orla, from returning to her parents in their rural village, and her mother, Mags, is so upset that she postpones the celebration until […]

MARTINA DEVLIN never cooks. She used to. She would prepare meals from scratch, and she did some baking too, but a few years ago she gave it up, deciding it was a mug’s game. So it’s […]

Asking for It. Quercus, €13.99; Kindle, €8.90 AT 18, Emma O’Donahue is beautiful, smart and supremely confident. She’s also controlling and fond of getting her own way. There’s a party. Keen to prove she’s not risk averse, […]

HEY,  Freak — still on hunger strike? — So starts A Lonely Note, the story of Tariq, a teenage Iraqi boy living in the states, who is bullied for being different. It’s a tough life. His […]

Mrs Engels. Gavin McCrea. Scribe.  ‘No one understands men better than the women they don’t marry, and my own opinion – beknown only to God – is that the difference between one man and another doesn’t […]

JOHN BOYNE has already proved that he’s a versatile writer. He had written some excellent takes on historical events even before 2006, when The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas made him a household name; and he […]

THERE’S a journalist in Elizabeth Day’s new novel. She’s called Esme Reade and, through her we gain some insight into journalism including the mechanics of a good interview. Arriving to meet the author, I’m nervous, in […]

Back in 2010, the novelist Catherine Dunne, then Chairperson of the Irish Writers Centre met  the Italian writer Federica Sgaggio. The two felt it would benefit Italian and Irish writers to meet and to share and […]

IMAGINE how it must be to gain overnight success? To secure a whopping six-figure book deal, and for the first book to live up to its best-selling promise? What if, after all that, you were unable […]