“I started to write a story and showed it to Pat Donlon and she told me to take it to O’Brien Press.” She pauses briefly to draw breath. But I regretted not going, and I was always doing little courses down in UCD, anything I found interesting really: Women in Literature, Anglo Irish Literature, Children’s Literature. Then I was working and then I got married. “I didn’t go to college after I left school, because my father had a stroke and I was looking after him.

Of course the story itself, which reflected our history, sowed seeds of inspiration, but there was a more profound revelation: the fictional heroes of our childhood could be Irish too. In the hour she spent with us eager readers, writing became something real. When we graduated to secondary school, Conlon-McKenna was brought in to speak to us by the school librarian, who was also a writer. There was a profound revelation: the fictional heroes of our childhood could be Irish too The book was read and reread and fought over and acted out by me and my sisters, as were the next installments of the series, which followed three Famine-orphaned siblings as they create a new life for themselves in America and Ireland. The harsh landscape evoked the tough, flat farmland surrounding our granny’s house in the west of Ireland.

The characters had names that sounded like those of my school-friends. If the historical premise suggested tragedy, the cover image by PJ Lynch promised courage and tenacity as well.īut it wasn’t just the gripping story of survival that captured my imagination. Then, one Christmas, in the bundle of books Santa brought every year, came Under the Hawthorn Tree by Marita Conlon-McKenna, the first in what would become The Children of the Famine series. As a bookish child in 1980s Ireland, I looked to England and America for my literary companions: the cliques of Enid Blyton’s boarding school books, the talented sisters in Noel Streatfield’s interwar fantasies, the gutsy rebels of Ann Montgomery, or American super-sleuth Nancy Drew.

Rebel sisters by marita conlon mckenna