Catherine Daly
Author of All Shook Up
Born in Dublin in 1966, Catherine had a varied childhood. At seven she moved to Brussels where her father was with the diplomatic service. The family spent seven years there, giving them plenty of opportunity to travel throughout Europe during the holidays. This gave Catherine a love of travel, which later led to many trips in Europe and Africa.
On returning to Ireland, Catherine went to school in Holy Child Killiney, following in the footsteps of Maeve Binchy and Eavan Boland. Although while at school, she enjoyed English, she did not yet entertain ideas of becoming a writer. (This was eighties Ireland- the advice was to get a qualification that guaranteed a job or a plane ticket or both.) However, although she does not remember feeling anything startling on reading the review for ‘Light a Penny Candle’ on the past pupils notice board in school, it is a moment which clearly buried itself in her subconscious as it was the first thing she thought of when she got the letter to tell her her own book was to be published.
After leaving school, Catherine studied engineering in UCD for a year before switching to Pharmacy in Trinity and she qualified as a pharmacist in 1990. In between stints working in community pharmacy in Ireland, she worked for five years as a hospital pharmacist in Chichester in the South of England. It was at the end of the Tory rule and their ‘rationalisation’ of the NHS but any stress entailed was balanced by the sheer diversity of the job. Apart from the opportunity to meet people from all walks of life- both patients and other healthcare professionals, a hospital pharmacy offers unique opportunities to witness some of the more bizarre aspects of modern medical science. A relatively frequent task was the re-hydration of dried cartilage from cadavers for use in facial reconstructions. On another occasion leeches had to have catgut stitched into their tails so that they could be safely used in the mouth without a risk of their disappearing down a patient’s throat! While Catherine was happy enough see the creatures leaving the pharmacy floating in their little pots of brine, she hated when they returned two or three times their original size!
After the birth of her second child Catherine gave up pharmacy to devote more time to the family, and in her spare time started to write (early mornings, late nights, or scribbling on kitchen paper with a crayon while liquidising lamb stew!). Once she started she found she couldn’t stop and soon ‘All Shook Up’ began to take shape.
Catherine lives in Dublin with her husband and two children and considers herself a parent with a part time job as a writer. In her spare time, whenever she can make some, she likes to garden and entertains a love of good food and good wine. But the hobby taking up most of her free time is reading.
She reads mainly fiction- novels or short stories- because she believes that the fiction writer is the writer most at liberty to explore real truth. She has never been able to decide on a single favourite author and reads a huge variety of styles. Favourite reads in the past year include John McGahern’s ‘That They May Face the Rising Sun’, JG Ballard’s ‘Collected Short Stories’, Jonathan Frantzen’s ‘Corrections’, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s ‘Inland Ice’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘Wilderness Tips’.
She feels privileged and humbled that anyone would consider her own scribblings worth taking the time to read.
