Evelyn Conlon - Born in 1952 in Co. Monaghan and educated there, she left in 1970 to briefly attend UCD. She was a winner of the European Schools Day essay competition in 1969 and had her first stories published at the age of seventeen in New Irish Writing, Irish Press.

At the age of nineteen she emigrated to Australia, sailing by ship to Sydney. She spent three years there, travelling throughout the country and working at ‘anything and everything, anywhere’,  including six months in the mining town of Mount Isa. She returned to Ireland in 1975, opting to travel by bus from Katmandu.  

On her return she gave birth to the first of her two sons, and then went back to third level education. To facilitate this she started a crèche in Maynooth, leading to the comment, ‘this is the only woman you will ever meet who started a crèche in a seminary’.  

 

Her first collection of short stories was published in 1987 and this has been followed to date by two more collections and three novels. She has compiled and edited three other books, and is a regular reviewer on radio and television.  She considers thorough research to be essential and "perhaps the most enjoyable part of the whole venture". She has lectured on this part of the process – writing her last novel entailed visiting Death Row in the US, and doing widespread interviews with people on both sides of the debate. Research for her present work has taken her back to Australia, which she "delightedly managed to put back on my map, over twenty years after leaving". She now lives in Dublin.

CRITICAL APPRECIATION

Extract from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 319: British and Irish Short-Fiction Writers, 1945-2000

 

REVIEWS

  • Review Samples

  • "Defiantly clear-sighted. Rigorously unsentimental. Time is man-handled. There  are quite simply no boring bits"
    Independent (London)
  • "Conlon has the rare ability to give her words an almost mythic overtone without ever sounding forced"
    The Times     (London)
  • "She is one of Ireland's major truly creative writers"
    Books Ireland
  • "Evelyn Conlon excels in exposing the dichotomy between public behaviour and private behaviour"
    Fortnight magazine
  • "She picks some of the threads from the fabric of love and examines them closely, refusing to take refuge in coyness or cliché"
    Irish Times
  • "…sharp sinuous writing, full of controlled anger and suddenly opened passion  …Committed writing, shot through with original thinking and surreal wit "
    The Scotsman
  • "In her latest novel Conlon disrupts apparently calm, untroubled surfaces to pose some very complex questions"
    Irish Studies Review
  • "A brilliant epistolary work suffusing a portrait of modern Dublin with the subtle wit of Clarissa"
    Kirkus Review, USA
  • "Her characters are articulate, passionate and frequently funny. Her prose is a delight"
    Sunday Times
  • "A genuinely exploratory writer, true to every kink which her imagination puts into her characters, her work is excitingly original"
    The Times
  • "Meticulously observant… Conlon writes with sane, sober wit; her lucid prose is pithy without falling into epigrams.
    Publishers Weekly
  • "Highlights the exceptional and unfathomable depths of what we nonchalantly dismiss as the normal, the everyday… Conlon emerges as champion of the individual, the Everyman and the Everywoman"
    The Irish Times.
  • "One of Ireland’s most distinctive and energetic voices"
    Feminist Bookstore News.
  • "This moving novel confronts the experience of capital punishment.  Through two continents and two generations Conlon traces the countenance of life and death and its so-called punishment, in a tale deftly told with revelation that startles with new insight"
    Sam Reese Sheppard.
  • Skin of Dreams – shortlisted for Irish Novel of the year, 2004 
  • FULL REVIEW TEXT 1
  • FULL REVIEW TEXT 2
  • FULL REVIEW TEXT 3

READINGS

  • In Europe, USA, Australia,
    Jerusalem, including:

  • Cúirt, Listowel, Co. Kerry
  • Kate O'Brien Weekend, Limerick
  • Scriobh, Sligo
  • Dublin International Writers’ Festival
  • Bowdoin College, Maine, USA
  • NEU, Boston
  • Hunter College, NY
  • Yale University.
  • L'Imaginaire Irlandaise, France 1996
  • Frankfurt Book Fair 1996
  • Amsterdam
  • Berlin
  • La fete du Livre, France, 1998, 2003
  • Melbourne Writers' Week, 1999
  • Writers’ Week, New South Wales, 1999, 2002
  • University of Queensland, Brisbane
  • Castlemaine, Orange, Lithgow Libraries
  • IASIL Conference, Kobe, and Waseda University, Tokyo.

PUBLICATIONS

WORKSHOPS

RESIDENCIES

OTHER WORK