I was born in Listowel, Co Kerry on the third of September (oh come on, you don’t really need to know the year), the third child of my parents. Dad, a primary school inspector, was stationed in Kerry at the time, and we lived by the sea in Ballybunion, which I’m sure was lovely but I’m afraid my memories of that time are a little dim as we moved to Tipperary town before I was one.

We spent nearly seven years there, during which time my mother had three more babies and I attended the Mercy convent and had lots of friends and fun. Our next move was to Limerick city when I was seven, and it was where we finally settled, Dad having reached a class of a plateau on the inspector’s ladder where they left him alone, (apart from one stint in Dublin) until he retired.

After school I went to Mary Immaculate College of Education to learn how to be a teacher. Mam and Dad had both started off as teachers, but Dad very quickly decided he would prefer to inspect, and Mam had to give up working when she married because of the ban on married women teachers, which seems impossibly ludicrous now.

By the time she was allowed back to the classroom she felt she’d been out of it too long, so when my youngest brother started school Mam opened a playschool in our house and ran it very successfully for ten years. (The fact that she was a much better teacher than she was a businesswoman, and charged ridiculously low rates, had nothing to do with the eager mothers lining up each year to enrol their tots.)

I got my first teaching job in St Mark’s Junior School in Tallaght, one of the biggest schools in Ireland at the time. I was put into the Junior Infant classroom, and I adored it. I probably wasn’t much of a teacher as I spent far too long having fun with my little charges and not enough time on the actual teaching bits, but nobody complained (at least not to my face.)

After two years, much as I loved St Mark’s, I couldn’t ignore my itchy feet any longer, and gave up the job (no career breaks in those days) and headed off to newly-independent Zimbabwe to teach English for the following two years, which I also loved. I taught teenagers, many of whom had been fighting in the war of independence just a few months before, and their enthusiasm and generosity charmed me – not to mention their incredible musical ability; the school choir regularly reduced me to tears.

My timing was wonderful when I returned to Ireland – a job had just come up in St Mark’s and I was invited to come back, which I did with great gusto, and where I remained until the numbers dropped and I (being the last in) was put on the panel, which meant that my job was no longer sustainable and I was up for grabs by any school in the area that needed a teacher.

At that stage my feet were beginning to itch again, so rather than start afresh in a new school I decided to head off again, and this time I found myself in London, where incredibly I got a job as an advertising copywriter in a sales promotions agency. I was writing ads, leaflets, brochures, coming up with marketing ideas, working with an art director to create ad campaigns – I quite literally thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was writing creatively, which I’d always enjoyed at school, and someone was paying me to do it. (Not a lot, admittedly, but I would have worked for food if they’d let me.)

Three years later I was back in Ireland, having decided that much as I loved writing for a living, the world of advertising, with its glitz and glamour, wasn’t for me. I moved back to Limerick and got a teaching job again, this time in the Limerick School Project (after a year as a temporary teacher in Galvone, where I met some of the nicest colleagues anyone could hope to work with.)

And it was at this stage, in the late nineties, that the idea of writing a book began to take root. I mulled it over for a while, during which time I attended a course on writing a novel given by David Rice of the Killaloe Hedge School in Clare (http://www.killaloe.ie/khs/) and then I took flight for the third time and landed this time in San Francisco, where one of my brothers had a house, and it was there I wrote The Daisy Picker, between 2001 and 2002.

As I was coming to the end of it, I heard about a competition Tivoli were running to launch themselves as a publishing company (the fiction imprint of Gill & Macmillan). Full of hope, I entered The Daisy Picker and incredibly, I won the prize of a two-book publishing deal and the princely sum of €2,000.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Sadly, Tivoli didn’t survive beyond my second novel, but I was lucky enough to be offered a new deal by Hodder Headline Ireland in 2006, and I'm still with them today, four books later, (they're now Hachette Books Ireland) and have just signed along the dotted line with them again for the next two. In 2008 I finally plucked up the courage to leave my permanent, pensionable teaching job (much to my parents' horror) and become a fulltime writer, and I don't regret it for a moment. In fact, I've never been happier!

I’m settled back in Limerick city with my very own house which I share with Tux and Tigs, my furry feline friends, just down the road from my parents, who are still hale and hearty, bless them. I fill my days with writing and baking and walking, and giving the odd creative writing workshop in schools, and once a week I drop into the local library and tell stories to any three to six year olds who'll listen!

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