Nuala O'Connor (Pic by Emilia Krysztofiak)

Writing Rights – Spotlight on Nuala O’Connor

As you’ll have seen on Thursday, we partnered with The Irish Times on the ‘Writing Rights’ project to mark Human Rights Day 2015.  Seven highly acclaimed Irish authors participated in this project, creating written responses – ranging from poetry to creative fiction to factual pieces – to various Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Over the coming days, we’ll be shining a spotlight on each of the authors that participated in this project.  First up is Nuala O’Connor, whose contribution to ‘Writing Rights’ was a piece of creative fiction called ‘The Turnip Slave’.  Nuala drew inspiration from Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms’.

Nuala is a well-known poet and author, whose most recent novel, ‘Miss Emily’, about the poet Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid, was shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Energy Eason Book Club Novel of the Year 2015 and the Eason Book Club Novel of the Year 2015. Nuala is also the author of the novels ‘You’ and ‘The Closet of Savage Momentos’, as well as highly acclaimed collections of poetry and short stories written under the name Nuala Ní Chonchúir. The most recent, ‘Mother America’, appeared from New Island in 2012.  Her third poetry collection, ‘The Juno Charm’, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2011.

‘Miss Emily’ was hailed by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne writing in The Irish Times as “a lyrical and thoroughly readable novel with a compelling storyline”.

Nuala lives in Galway with her husband and three children.  Read her contribution to ‘Writing Rights’ here.

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